Scholars@Duke
Jenny Tung

Jenny Tung

Visiting Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology
Evolutionary Anthropology
jenny.tung@duke.edu
Box 90383, Durham, NC 27708
08 Bio Sci, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

A female-biased gene expression signature of dominance in cooperatively breeding meerkats.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · November 2024 Dominance is a primary determinant of social dynamics and resource access in social animals. Recent studies show that dominance is also reflected in the gene regulatory profiles of peripheral immune cells. However, the strength and direction of this relati ... Full text Cite

Using non-invasive behavioral and physiological data to measure biological age in wild baboons.

Journal Article GeroScience · October 2024 Biological aging is near-ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its timing and pace vary between individuals and over lifespans. Prospective, individual-based studies of wild animals-especially non-human primates-help identify the social and environmental d ... Full text Cite

The fortunes and misfortunes of social life across the life course: A new era of research from field, laboratory and comparative studies.

Journal Article Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · July 2024 Social gradients in health and aging have been reported in studies across many human populations, and - as the papers included in this special collection highlight - also occur across species. This paper serves as a general introduction to the special coll ... Full text Cite

Understanding human uniqueness in the pre-genomic era.

Journal Article Nature reviews. Genetics · July 2024 Full text Cite

DNA methylation signatures of early-life adversity are exposure-dependent in wild baboons.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · March 2024 The early-life environment can profoundly shape the trajectory of an animal's life, even years or decades later. One mechanism proposed to contribute to these early-life effects is DNA methylation. However, the frequency and functional importance of DNA me ... Full text Cite

DNA methylation-environment interactions in the human genome.

Journal Article eLife · February 2024 Previously, we showed that a massively parallel reporter assay, mSTARR-seq, could be used to simultaneously test for both enhancer-like activity and DNA methylation-dependent enhancer activity for millions of loci in a single experiment (Lea et al., 2018). ... Full text Cite

A multi-million-year natural experiment: Comparative genomics on a massive scale and its implications for human health.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2024 Improving the diversity and quality of genome assemblies for non-human mammals has been a long-standing goal of comparative genomics. The last year saw substantial progress towards this goal, including the release of genome alignments for 240 mammals and n ... Full text Cite

Next-generation primate genomics: New genome assemblies unlock new questions.

Journal Article Cell · December 2023 Nonhuman primates provide unique evolutionary and comparative insight into the human phenotype. Genome assemblies are now available for nearly half of the species in the primate order, expanding our understanding of genetic variation within and between spe ... Full text Cite

Early life drought predicts components of adult body size in wild female baboons.

Journal Article American journal of biological anthropology · November 2023 ObjectivesIn many taxa, adverse early-life environments are associated with reduced growth and smaller body size in adulthood. However, in wild primates, we know very little about whether, where, and to what degree trajectories are influenced by e ... Full text Cite

Environmental, sex-specific and genetic determinants of infant social behaviour in a wild primate.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · November 2023 Affiliative social bonds are linked to fitness components in many social mammals. However, despite their importance, little is known about how the tendency to form social bonds develops in young animals, or if the timing of development is heritable and thu ... Full text Cite

Five Decades of Data Yield No Support for Adaptive Biasing of Offspring Sex Ratio in Wild Baboons (Papio cynocephalus).

Journal Article The American naturalist · October 2023 AbstractOver the past 50 years, a wealth of testable, often conflicting hypotheses have been generated about the evolution of offspring sex ratio manipulation by mothers. Several of these hypotheses have received support in studies of invertebrates and som ... Full text Cite

Social and early life determinants of survival from cradle to grave: A case study in wild baboons.

Journal Article Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · September 2023 Field studies of natural mammal populations present powerful opportunities to investigate the determinants of health and aging using fine-grained observations of known individuals across the life course. Here, we synthesize five decades of findings from on ... Full text Cite

Genetic variance and indirect genetic effects for affiliative social behavior in a wild primate.

Journal Article Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · June 2023 Affiliative social behaviors are linked to fitness components in multiple species. However, the role of genetic variance in shaping such behaviors remains largely unknown, limiting our understanding of how affiliative behaviors can respond to natural selec ... Full text Cite

Data from: Social and early life determinants of survival from cradle to grave: a case study in wild baboons

Dataset · May 15, 2023 Harsh early life environments are linked to a variety of negative outcomes in humans and non-human primates, including poor survival in adulthood. Understanding the pathways that drive the relationship between early life adversity and reduced survival is k ... Full text Cite

Universal gut microbial relationships in the gut microbiome of wild baboons.

Journal Article eLife · May 2023 Ecological relationships between bacteria mediate the services that gut microbiomes provide to their hosts. Knowing the overall direction and strength of these relationships is essential to learn how ecology scales up to affect microbiome assembly, dynamic ... Full text Cite

Early life adversity and adult social relationships have independent effects on survival in a wild primate.

Journal Article Science advances · May 2023 Adverse conditions in early life can have negative consequences for adult health and survival in humans and other animals. What variables mediate the relationship between early adversity and adult survival? Adult social environments represent one candidate ... Full text Cite

Ecology and age, but not genetic ancestry, predict fetal loss in a wild baboon hybrid zone.

Journal Article American journal of biological anthropology · April 2023 ObjectivesPregnancy failure represents a major fitness cost for any mammal, particularly those with slow life histories such as primates. Here, we quantified the risk of fetal loss in wild hybrid baboons, including genetic, ecological, and demogra ... Full text Cite

Selection against admixture and gene regulatory divergence in a long-term primate field study.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · August 2022 Genetic admixture is central to primate evolution. We combined 50 years of field observations of immigration and group demography with genomic data from ~9 generations of hybrid baboons to investigate the consequences of admixture in the wild. Despite no o ... Full text Cite

Synchrony and idiosyncrasy in the gut microbiome of wild baboons.

Journal Article Nature ecology & evolution · July 2022 Human gut microbial dynamics are highly individualized, making it challenging to link microbiota to health and to design universal microbiome therapies. This individuality is typically attributed to variation in host genetics, diets, environments and medic ... Full text Cite

Mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance in a wild primate.

Journal Article Current biology : CB · April 2022 Inbreeding often imposes net fitness costs,1-5 leading to the expectation that animals will engage in inbreeding avoidance when the costs of doing so are not prohibitive.4-9 However, one recent meta-analysis indicates that animals of ... Full text Cite

The biology of beauty sleep.

Journal Article Nature ecology & evolution · April 2022 Full text Cite

Distinct gene regulatory signatures of dominance rank and social bond strength in wild baboons.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · February 2022 The social environment is a major determinant of morbidity, mortality and Darwinian fitness in social animals. Recent studies have begun to uncover the molecular processes associated with these relationships, but the degree to which they vary across differ ... Full text Cite

Agonism and grooming behaviour explain social status effects on physiology and gene regulation in rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · February 2022 Variation in social status predicts molecular, physiological and life-history outcomes across a broad range of species, including our own. Experimental studies indicate that some of these relationships persist even when the physical environment is held con ... Full text Cite

Emerging frontiers in animal behavior and parasitism: Integration across scales

Chapter · January 1, 2022 Research on animal behavior and parasitism is intrinsically interdisciplinary. This chapter explores potential expansions to the frontiers of this research from additional perspectives, transcending three scales of biological organization. Focusing on the ... Full text Cite

Genetic ancestry predicts male-female affiliation in a natural baboon hybrid zone.

Journal Article Animal behaviour · October 2021 Opposite-sex social relationships are important predictors of fitness in many animals, including several group-living mammals. Consequently, understanding sources of variance in the tendency to form opposite-sex relationships is important for understanding ... Full text Cite

Erratum: Dominance rank-associated gene expression is widespread, sex-specific, and a precursor to high social status in wild male baboons (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2018) 115 (E12163–E12171) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1811967115)

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · September 7, 2021 Correction to Supporting Information for “Dominance rank-associated gene expression is widespread, sex-specific, and a precursor to high social status in wild male baboons,” by Amanda J. Lea, Mercy Y. Akinyi, Ruth Nyakundi, Peter Mareri, Fred Nyundo, Thoma ... Full text Cite

K Locus Effects in Gray Wolves: Experimental Assessment of TLR3 Signaling and the Gene Expression Response to Canine Distemper Virus.

Journal Article The Journal of heredity · August 2021 In North American gray wolves, black coat color is dominantly inherited via a 3 base pair coding deletion in the canine beta defensin 3 (CBD103) gene. This 3 base pair deletion, called the KB allele, was introduced through hybridization with dogs and subse ... Full text Cite

Sparrows and supergenes: Ecological epigenetics in action.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · July 2021 Despite the promise of ecological epigenetics, there remain few cases that clearly link epigenetic variation in wild animal populations to evolutionary change. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Sun et al. provide such an example in white-throated sparrow ... Full text Cite

Extragroup paternity in gelada monkeys, Theropithecus gelada, at Guassa, Ethiopia and a comparison with other primates

Journal Article Animal Behaviour · July 1, 2021 Following the introduction of DNA fingerprinting in the 1980s, studies have repeatedly revealed mismatches between the mating system inferred from social behaviour and the mating system revealed through genetic relationships. In this study, we examined the ... Full text Cite

Gut microbiome heritability is nearly universal but environmentally contingent.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · July 2021 Relatives have more similar gut microbiomes than nonrelatives, but the degree to which this similarity results from shared genotypes versus shared environments has been controversial. Here, we leveraged 16,234 gut microbiome profiles, collected over 14 yea ... Full text Cite

The long lives of primates and the 'invariant rate of ageing' hypothesis.

Journal Article Nature communications · June 2021 Is it possible to slow the rate of ageing, or do biological constraints limit its plasticity? We test the 'invariant rate of ageing' hypothesis, which posits that the rate of ageing is relatively fixed within species, with a collection of 39 human and nonh ... Full text Cite

High social status males experience accelerated epigenetic aging in wild baboons.

Journal Article eLife · April 2021 Aging, for virtually all life, is inescapable. However, within populations, biological aging rates vary. Understanding sources of variation in this process is central to understanding the biodemography of natural populations. We constructed a DNA methylati ... Full text Cite

Morphological and genomic shifts in mole-rat 'queens' increase fecundity but reduce skeletal integrity.

Journal Article eLife · April 2021 In some mammals and many social insects, highly cooperative societies are characterized by reproductive division of labor, in which breeders and nonbreeders become behaviorally and morphologically distinct. While differences in behavior and growth between ... Full text Open Access Cite

Glucocorticoid exposure predicts survival in female baboons.

Journal Article Science advances · April 2021 Are differences in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation across the adult life span linked to differences in survival? This question has been the subject of considerable debate. We analyze the link between survival and fecal glucocorticoid ( ... Full text Cite

Primate phageomes are structured by superhost phylogeny and environment.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2021 Humans harbor diverse communities of microorganisms, the majority of which are bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. These gut bacterial communities in turn host diverse bacteriophage (hereafter phage) communities that have a major impact on their struct ... Full text Cite

Accelerated reproduction is not an adaptive response to early-life adversity in wild baboons.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2020 Featured Publication In humans and other long-lived species, harsh conditions in early life often lead to profound differences in adult life expectancy. In response, natural selection is expected to accelerate the timing and pace of reproduction in individuals who experience s ... Full text Cite

Social history and exposure to pathogen signals modulate social status effects on gene regulation in rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · September 2020 Featured Publication Social experience is an important predictor of disease susceptibility and survival in humans and other social mammals. Chronic social stress is thought to generate a proinflammatory state characterized by elevated antibacterial defenses and reduced investm ... Full text Cite

Broadening primate genomics: new insights into the ecology and evolution of primate gene regulation.

Journal Article Current opinion in genetics & development · June 2020 Featured Publication Comparative analyses have played a key role in understanding how gene regulatory evolution contributes to primate phenotypic diversity. Recently, these studies have expanded to include a wider range of species, within-population as well as interspecific an ... Full text Cite

Social determinants of health and survival in humans and other animals.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · May 2020 Featured Publication The social environment, both in early life and adulthood, is one of the strongest predictors of morbidity and mortality risk in humans. Evidence from long-term studies of other social mammals indicates that this relationship is similar across many species. ... Full text Open Access Cite

IMAGE: high-powered detection of genetic effects on DNA methylation using integrated methylation QTL mapping and allele-specific analysis.

Journal Article Genome biology · October 2019 Identifying genetic variants that are associated with methylation variation-an analysis commonly referred to as methylation quantitative trait locus (mQTL) mapping-is important for understanding the epigenetic mechanisms underlying genotype-trait associati ... Full text Cite

Social Status and Gene Regulation: Conservation and Context Dependence in Primates.

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · September 2019 Current models suggest that low social status affects immune function by increasing inflammation and compromising antiviral defense. While this pattern appears to be somewhat conserved, recent studies argue that the gene regulatory signature of social stat ... Full text Cite

Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons.

Journal Article eLife · September 2019 Early life adversity can affect an individual's health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual's offspring is not well understood. W ... Full text Cite

Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons

Journal Article eLife · September 1, 2019 Early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual’s offspring is not well understood. W ... Full text Cite

Molecular footprint of Medawar's mutation accumulation process in mammalian aging.

Journal Article Aging cell · August 2019 Medawar's mutation accumulation hypothesis explains aging by the declining force of natural selection with age: Slightly deleterious germline mutations expressed in old age can drift to fixation and thereby lead to aging-related phenotypes. Although widely ... Full text Cite

Megaphages infect Prevotella and variants are widespread in gut microbiomes.

Journal Article Nature microbiology · April 2019 Bacteriophages (phages) dramatically shape microbial community composition, redistribute nutrients via host lysis and drive evolution through horizontal gene transfer. Despite their importance, much remains to be learned about phages in the human microbiom ... Full text Cite

Genes, geology and germs: gut microbiota across a primate hybrid zone are explained by site soil properties, not host species.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · April 2019 Gut microbiota in geographically isolated host populations are often distinct. These differences have been attributed to between-population differences in host behaviours, environments, genetics and geographical distance. However, which factors are most im ... Full text Cite

Evolution of DNA Methylation in Papio Baboons.

Journal Article Molecular biology and evolution · March 2019 Changes in gene regulation have long been thought to play an important role in primate evolution. However, although a number of studies have compared genome-wide gene expression patterns across primate species, fewer have investigated the gene regulatory m ... Full text Cite

Climate and Land Cover Analysis Suggest No Strong Ecological Barriers to Gene Flow in a Natural Baboon Hybrid Zone

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · February 15, 2019 Admixture between diverging taxa has made, and continues to make, an important contribution to primate diversity and evolution. However, although naturally occurring hybrids have now been documented in all major primate lineages, we still know relatively l ... Full text Cite

Social status alters chromatin accessibility and the gene regulatory response to glucocorticoid stimulation in rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2019 Low social status is an important predictor of disease susceptibility and mortality risk in humans and other social mammals. These effects are thought to stem in part from dysregulation of the glucocorticoid (GC)-mediated stress response. However, the mole ... Full text Cite

The comparative genomics and complex population history of Papio baboons.

Journal Article Science advances · January 2019 Recent studies suggest that closely related species can accumulate substantial genetic and phenotypic differences despite ongoing gene flow, thus challenging traditional ideas regarding the genetics of speciation. Baboons (genus Papio) are Old World ... Full text Cite

Social affiliation predicts mitochondrial DNA copy number in female rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Biology letters · January 2019 In many social mammals, social adversity predicts compromised health and reduced fitness. These effects are thought to be driven in part by chronic social stress, but their molecular underpinnings are not well understood. Recent work suggests that chronic ... Full text Cite

Generating RNA Baits for Capture-Based Enrichment.

Journal Article Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · January 2019 Capture-based enrichment techniques have revolutionized genomic analysis of species and populations for which only low-quality or contaminated DNA samples (e.g., ancient DNA, noninvasively collected DNA, environmental DNA) are available. This chapter outli ... Full text Cite

Alu insertion polymorphisms shared by Papio baboons and Theropithecus gelada reveal an intertwined common ancestry.

Journal Article Mobile DNA · January 2019 BackgroundBaboons (genus Papio) and geladas (Theropithecus gelada) are now generally recognized as close phylogenetic relatives, though morphologically quite distinct and generally classified in separate genera. Primate specific A ... Full text Cite

Genome-wide quantification of the effects of DNA methylation on human gene regulation.

Journal Article Elife · December 21, 2018 Changes in DNA methylation are involved in development, disease, and the response to environmental conditions. However, not all regulatory elements are functionally methylation-dependent (MD). Here, we report a method, mSTARR-seq, that assesses the causal ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dominance rank-associated gene expression is widespread, sex-specific, and a precursor to high social status in wild male baboons.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2018 In humans and other hierarchical species, social status is tightly linked to variation in health and fitness-related traits. Experimental manipulations of social status in female rhesus macaques suggest that this relationship is partially explained by stat ... Full text Cite

Dominance rank-associated immune gene expression is widespread, sex-specific, and a precursor to high social status in wild male baboons

Journal Article · 2018 ABSTRACT In humans and other hierarchical species, social status is tightly linked to variation in health and fitness-related traits. Experimental manipulations of social status in female rhesus macaques suggest that this relationship is partially ... Full text Cite

The contribution of admixture to primate evolution.

Journal Article Current opinion in genetics & development · December 2017 Genome-wide data on genetic variation are now available for multiple primate species and populations, facilitating analyses of evolutionary history within and across taxa. One emerging theme from these studies involves the central role of admixture. Genomi ... Full text Cite

Group Living and Male Dispersal Predict the Core Gut Microbiome in Wild Baboons.

Journal Article Integrative and comparative biology · October 2017 The mammalian gut microbiome plays a profound role in the physiology, metabolism, and overall health of its host. However, biologists have only a nascent understanding of the forces that drive inter-individual heterogeneity in gut microbial composition, es ... Full text Cite

Alu Insertion Polymorphisms as Evidence for Population Structure in Baboons.

Journal Article Genome biology and evolution · September 2017 Male dispersal from the natal group at or near maturity is a feature of most baboon (Papio) species. It potentially has profound effects upon population structure and evolutionary processes, but dispersal, especially for unusually long distances, is not re ... Full text Cite

Maximizing ecological and evolutionary insight in bisulfite sequencing data sets.

Journal Article Nature ecology & evolution · August 2017 Genome-scale bisulfite sequencing approaches have opened the door to ecological and evolutionary studies of DNA methylation in many organisms. These approaches can be powerful. However, they introduce new methodological and statistical considerations, some ... Full text Cite

Vasopressin and the Neurogenetics of Parental Care.

Journal Article Neuron · July 2017 Making robust connections between genetic variation, neurophysiology, and social behavior remains a challenge. A study by Bendesky et al. (2017) tackles this challenge by dissecting the genetic architecture of parental care in deer mice to discover an impo ... Full text Cite

Differential expression analysis for RNAseq using Poisson mixed models.

Journal Article Nucleic acids research · June 2017 Identifying differentially expressed (DE) genes from RNA sequencing (RNAseq) studies is among the most common analyses in genomics. However, RNAseq DE analysis presents several statistical and computational challenges, including over-dispersed read counts ... Full text Cite

Socially structured gut microbiomes in wild baboons

Conference INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY · March 1, 2017 Link to item Cite

Ovarian cycling and reproductive state shape the vaginal microbiota in wild baboons.

Journal Article Microbiome · January 2017 BackgroundThe vaginal microbiome is an important site of bacterial-mammalian symbiosis. This symbiosis is currently best characterized for humans, where lactobacilli dominate the microbial community and may help defend women against infectious dis ... Full text Cite

Developmental plasticity: Bridging research in evolution and human health.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2017 Early life experiences can have profound and persistent effects on traits expressed throughout the life course, with consequences for later life behavior, disease risk, and mortality rates. The shaping of later life traits by early life environments, known ... Full text Open Access Cite

Dominance rank causally affects personality and glucocorticoid regulation in female rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Psychoneuroendocrinology · December 2016 Low social status is frequently associated with heightened exposure to social stressors and altered glucocorticoid regulation by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Additionally, personality differences can affect how individuals behave in respo ... Full text Cite

Social status alters immune regulation and response to infection in macaques.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · November 2016 Social status is one of the strongest predictors of human disease risk and mortality, and it also influences Darwinian fitness in social mammals more generally. To understand the biological basis of these effects, we combined genomics with a social status ... Full text Cite

Genetic Ancestry and Natural Selection Drive Population Differences in Immune Responses to Pathogens.

Journal Article Cell · October 2016 Individuals from different populations vary considerably in their susceptibility to immune-related diseases. To understand how genetic variation and natural selection contribute to these differences, we tested for the effects of African versus European anc ... Full text Cite

Pervasive Effects of Aging on Gene Expression in Wild Wolves.

Journal Article Molecular biology and evolution · August 2016 Gene expression levels change as an individual ages and responds to environmental conditions. With the exception of humans, such patterns have principally been studied under controlled conditions, overlooking the array of developmental and environmental in ... Full text Cite

Common methods for fecal sample storage in field studies yield consistent signatures of individual identity in microbiome sequencing data.

Journal Article Scientific reports · August 2016 Field studies of wild vertebrates are frequently associated with extensive collections of banked fecal samples-unique resources for understanding ecological, behavioral, and phylogenetic effects on the gut microbiome. However, we do not understand whether ... Full text Cite

Genomewide ancestry and divergence patterns from low-coverage sequencing data reveal a complex history of admixture in wild baboons.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · July 2016 Naturally occurring admixture has now been documented in every major primate lineage, suggesting its key role in primate evolutionary history. Active primate hybrid zones can provide valuable insight into this process. Here, we investigate the history of a ... Full text Cite

Efficient Genome-Wide Sequencing and Low-Coverage Pedigree Analysis from Noninvasively Collected Samples.

Journal Article Genetics · June 2016 Research on the genetics of natural populations was revolutionized in the 1990s by methods for genotyping noninvasively collected samples. However, these methods have remained largely unchanged for the past 20 years and lag far behind the genomics era. To ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cumulative early life adversity predicts longevity in wild baboons

Journal Article Nat Commun · April 19, 2016 In humans and other animals, harsh circumstances in early life predict morbidity and mortality in adulthood. Multiple adverse conditions are thought to be especially toxic, but this hypothesis has rarely been tested in a prospective, longitudinal framework ... Open Access Link to item Cite

Resource base influences genome-wide DNA methylation levels in wild baboons (Papio cynocephalus).

Journal Article Molecular ecology · April 2016 Variation in resource availability commonly exerts strong effects on fitness-related traits in wild animals. However, we know little about the molecular mechanisms that mediate these effects, or about their persistence over time. To address these questions ... Full text Cite

Social status drives social relationships in groups of unrelated female rhesus macaques.

Journal Article Animal behaviour · January 2016 Strong social relationships confer health and fitness benefits in a number of species, motivating the need to understand the processes through which they arise. In female cercopithecine primates, both kinship and dominance rank are thought to influence rat ... Full text Cite

Social behavior and the microbiome

Journal Article Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences · December 1, 2015 Animals are home to diverse bacterial communities that can affect their hosts' physiology, metabolism, and susceptibility to disease. Here we highlight recent research that reveals surprising and important connections between an individual's microbiome and ... Full text Cite

Bacterial infection remodels the DNA methylation landscape of human dendritic cells.

Journal Article Genome research · December 2015 DNA methylation is an epigenetic mark thought to be robust to environmental perturbations on a short time scale. Here, we challenge that view by demonstrating that the infection of human dendritic cells (DCs) with a live pathogenic bacteria is associated w ... Full text Cite

A Flexible, Efficient Binomial Mixed Model for Identifying Differential DNA Methylation in Bisulfite Sequencing Data.

Journal Article PLoS genetics · November 2015 Identifying sources of variation in DNA methylation levels is important for understanding gene regulation. Recently, bisulfite sequencing has become a popular tool for investigating DNA methylation levels. However, modeling bisulfite sequencing data is com ... Full text Cite

Self-organizing dominance hierarchies in a wild primate population.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · September 2015 Linear dominance hierarchies, which are common in social animals, can profoundly influence access to limited resources, reproductive opportunities and health. In spite of their importance, the mechanisms that govern the dynamics of such hierarchies remain ... Full text Cite

Developmental constraints in a wild primate.

Journal Article The American naturalist · June 2015 Early-life experiences can dramatically affect adult traits. However, the evolutionary origins of such early-life effects are debated. The predictive adaptive response hypothesis argues that adverse early environments prompt adaptive phenotypic adjustments ... Full text Cite

Social networks predict gut microbiome composition in wild baboons.

Journal Article eLife · March 2015 Social relationships have profound effects on health in humans and other primates, but the mechanisms that explain this relationship are not well understood. Using shotgun metagenomic data from wild baboons, we found that social group membership and social ... Full text Cite

The genetic architecture of gene expression levels in wild baboons.

Journal Article eLife · February 2015 Primate evolution has been argued to result, in part, from changes in how genes are regulated. However, we still know little about gene regulation in natural primate populations. We conducted an RNA sequencing (RNA-seq)-based study of baboons from an inten ... Full text Cite

Canine length in wild male baboons: maturation, aging and social dominance rank.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2015 Canines represent an essential component of the dentition for any heterodont mammal. In primates, like many other mammals, canines are frequently used as weapons. Hence, tooth size and wear may have significant implications for fighting ability, and conseq ... Full text Cite

Shared signatures of social stress and aging in peripheral blood mononuclear cell gene expression profiles.

Journal Article Aging cell · October 2014 Chronic social stress is a predictor of both aging-related disease and mortality risk. Hence, chronic stress has been hypothesized to directly exacerbate the process of physiological aging. Here, we evaluated this hypothesis at the level of gene regulation ... Full text Cite

Social affiliation matters: both same-sex and opposite-sex relationships predict survival in wild female baboons.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · October 2014 Social integration and support can have profound effects on human survival. The extent of this phenomenon in non-human animals is largely unknown, but such knowledge is important to understanding the evolution of both lifespan and sociality. Here, we repor ... Full text Cite

RNA-seq: impact of RNA degradation on transcript quantification.

Journal Article BMC biology · May 2014 BackgroundThe use of low quality RNA samples in whole-genome gene expression profiling remains controversial. It is unclear if transcript degradation in low quality RNA samples occurs uniformly, in which case the effects of degradation can be corr ... Full text Cite

Social and ecological predictors of DNA methylation in wild baboons

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2014 Link to item Cite

Social environmental effects on gene regulation

Journal Article Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences · November 1, 2013 Social environmental conditions, particularly the experience of social adversity, have long been connected with health and mortality in humans and other social mammals. Efforts to identify the physiological basis for these effects have historically focused ... Full text Cite

Genetic effects on mating success and partner choice in a social mammal.

Journal Article The American naturalist · July 2012 Mating behavior has profound consequences for two phenomena--individual reproductive success and the maintenance of species boundaries--that contribute to evolutionary processes. Studies of mating behavior in relation to individual reproductive success are ... Full text Cite

Getting under—and through—the skin: ecological genomics of chytridiomycosis infection in frogs.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · July 2012 Amphibian species around the world are currently becoming endangered or lost at a rate that outstrips other vertebrates—victims of a combination of habitat loss, climate change and susceptibility to emerging infectious disease (Stuart et al. 2004). One of ... Full text Cite

Social environment is associated with gene regulatory variation in the rhesus macaque immune system.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2012 Variation in the social environment is a fundamental component of many vertebrate societies. In humans and other primates, adverse social environments often translate into lasting physiological costs. The biological mechanisms associated with these effects ... Full text Cite

Genetic structure in a dynamic baboon hybrid zone corroborates behavioural observations in a hybrid population.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · February 2012 Behaviour and genetic structure are intimately related: mating patterns and patterns of movement between groups or populations influence the movement of genetic variation across the landscape and from one generation to the next. In hybrid zones, the behavi ... Full text Cite

Changes in gene expression associated with reproductive maturation in wild female baboons.

Journal Article Genome biology and evolution · January 2012 Changes in gene expression during development play an important role in shaping morphological and behavioral differences, including between humans and nonhuman primates. Although many of the most striking developmental changes occur during early developmen ... Full text Cite

Treponema pallidum infection in the wild baboons of East Africa: distribution and genetic characterization of the strains responsible.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2012 It has been known for decades that wild baboons are naturally infected with Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes the diseases syphilis (subsp. pallidum), yaws (subsp. pertenue), and bejel (subsp. endemicum) in humans. Recently, a form of T. pallid ... Full text Cite

Allele-specific gene expression in a wild nonhuman primate population.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · February 2011 Natural populations hold enormous potential for evolutionary genetic studies, especially when phenotypic, genetic and environmental data are all available on the same individuals. However, untangling the genotype-phenotype relationship in natural populatio ... Full text Cite

Evolutionary genetics in wild primates: combining genetic approaches with field studies of natural populations.

Journal Article Trends in genetics : TIG · August 2010 Ecological and evolutionary studies of wild primates hold important keys to understanding both the shared characteristics of primate biology and the genetic and phenotypic differences that make specific lineages, including our own, unique. Although complem ... Full text Cite

Evolution of functional genetic variation at immune loci in wild baboons.

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · January 1, 2010 Link to item Cite

Evolution of Traits Deduced from Genome Comparisons

Journal Article eLS · December 15, 2009 Full text Cite

Genomic features that predict allelic imbalance in humans suggest patterns of constraint on gene expression variation.

Journal Article Molecular biology and evolution · September 2009 Variation in gene expression is an important contributor to phenotypic diversity within and between species. Although this variation often has a genetic component, identification of the genetic variants driving this relationship remains challenging. In par ... Full text Cite

Evolution of a malaria resistance gene in wild primates.

Journal Article Nature · July 2009 The ecology, behaviour and genetics of our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, should help us to understand the evolution of our own lineage. Although a large amount of data has been amassed on primate ecology and behaviour, much less is known ... Full text Cite

Seeing red: Behavioral evidence of trichromatic color vision in strepsirrhine primates

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology · January 12, 2009 Among primates, catarrhines (Old World monkeys and apes) and certain platyrrhines (New World monkeys) possess trichromatic color vision, which might confer important evolutionary advantages, particularly during foraging. Recently, a polymorphism has been s ... Full text Cite

Genetic evidence reveals temporal change in hybridization patterns in a wild baboon population.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · April 2008 The process and consequences of hybridization are of interest to evolutionary biologists because of the importance of hybridization in understanding reproductive isolation, speciation, and the influence of introgression on population genetic structure. Rec ... Full text Cite

Age at maturity in wild baboons: genetic, environmental and demographic influences.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · April 2008 The timing of early life-history events, such as sexual maturation and first reproduction, can greatly influence variation in individual fitness. In this study, we analysed possible sources of variation underlying different measures of age at social and ph ... Full text Cite

Parallel effects of genetic variation in ACE activity in baboons and humans.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · September 2007 Like humans, savannah baboons (Papio sp.) show heritable interindividual variation in complex physiological phenotypes. One prominent example of such variation involves production of the homeostatic regulator protein angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), wh ... Full text Cite