How improving acoustic monitoring of bats could help protecting biodiversity eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Retroviruses are re-writing koala genome and causing cancer
Koalas are facing multiple environmental and health issues which threaten their survival. Along with habitat loss – accelerated by last year’s devastating bush fires – domestic dog attacks and road accidents, they suffer from deadly chlamydial infections and extremely high frequency of cancer.
Wild Koala | Photo: A. Gillett
An international team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now demonstrate that a retrovirus invading the koala germline explains the high frequency of koala cancer. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The koala retrovirus (KoRV) is a virus which, like other retroviruses such as HIV, inserts itself into the DNA of an infected cell. At some point in the past 50,000 years, KoRV has infected the egg or sperm cells of koalas, leading to offspring that carry the retrovirus in every cell in their body. The entire k
Retroviruses are re-writing the koala genome and causing cancer eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Genomic and epigenomic analyses reveal speciation in mole rat populations without sharp separation
For new species to evolve, conventional wisdom suggests that geographically isolated populations must exist that form separate reproductive communities.
Spalax ehrenbergii | Author: Bassem18 wikimedia
This isolation allows the genomes to slowly diverge and thus form new species. An international research team with participation of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the University of Haifa has now reconstructed the first reported case of localspeciation within a common gene pool in subterranean mole rats, a group of species which are rodents. Four out of five mole rat species of the superspecies Spalax ehrenbergi originated due to climate divergence over the past 1.5 million years, regionally across the country, and locally in the Upper Galilee through geological and soil microscale adaptive divergence in the last 228,000 years without chr