Author Correction: Comparative and demographic analysis of orang-utan genomes

Correction to: Nature 10.1038/nature09687 Published online 26 January 2011

In this Article, we reported genome sequencing data from five Sumatran and five Bornean orang-utans. In re-analysing these data, Banes et al.¹ found that eight of the ten samples were mislabelled, and we wish to correct the original publication according to their findings. In addition, Banes et al.¹ find that one of the orang-utans that we had labelled as a male Sumatran is in fact a female Tapanuli orang-utan (an orang-utan species that was unknown at the time of publication of our original Article and that was first reported in 2017 (ref. ²)). While we here correct the original tables to display the correct names and IDs of the individuals studied, we do not correct the analyses in the original paper since the Tapanuli species was discovered only after we had concluded our study. We refer the reader to Banes et al.¹ for further information.

In the main text, the sentence “We also sequenced the genomes of 10 additional unrelated wild-caught orang-utans, five Sumatran and five Bornean, using a short read sequencing platform (297 Gb of data in total; Supplementary Information section 4)” should have read “We also sequenced the genomes of 10 additional unrelated wild-caught orang-utans, four Sumatran, five Bornean and one Tapanuli, using a short read sequencing platform (297 Gb of data in total; Supplementary Information section 4)”.

In addition, the sentence “We then called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the alignment of all short read data from 10 individuals (five Bornean, including the 20-fold coverage mentioned above, and five Sumatran) (Supplementary Information section 4)” should have read “We then called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the alignment of all short read data from 10 individuals (five Bornean, including the 20-fold coverage mentioned above, four Sumatran and one Tapanuli) (Supplementary Information section 4).

Supplementary Data to this Amendment corrects the sample ID in the original Supplementary Data (‘Accession Table for Bornean and Sumatran Orangutan Short Read Data’) for animal sample ID KB9258 from a Sumatran male to a Tapanuli female (line 204). In Supplemental Section S4 of the original Supplementary Information, the first sentence “The orangutan population diversity survey utilized DNA from 5 Sumatran and 5 Bornean wild-caught orang-utans […]” should have read “The orangutan population diversity survey utilized DNA from 4 Sumatran, 5 Bornean and 1 Tapanuli wild-caught orang-utans […]”. Supplementary Table 1 to this Amendment shows a corrected version of the original Supplementary Table S4-1, reproduced with modifications from Banes et al.¹.

None of these corrections affect the results and conclusions of the original Article with the exception of Fig. 5 in the main text. The estimates of SNPs in panel a, allele counts in panel b and estimates of population (N_e) should be recalculated for the Sumatran and Tapanuli separately in the future. Our Bornean estimates in Fig. 5 are unaffected by this sample mislabelling, as noted in Banes et al.¹. The original Article has not been corrected online.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41586-022-04799-7.