Editor's Pick: Researchers at Texas A&M University are studying how bats carry deadly viruses without showing symptoms. They found that what happens in group behavior – such as the social gatherings of bats – could be the key to understanding their tolerance to the virus and translating it into human health in the fight against diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19.
Bats carry some of the deadliest zoonotic diseases that can infect both humans and animals, such as Ebola and COVID-19.
In a recent article published in the journal Cellular Genomics, a team of researchers from Texas A&M University revealed that certain species of bats are able to defend against the viruses they carry because they typically exchange immune genes in seasonal matings.
Understanding how bats evolved to tolerate viruses may help us understand how humans can better fight emerging diseases," said Foley from Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences. They may be developing vaccines for diseases or monitoring vulnerable animal populations. We depend on each other to stay ahead of the next pandemic. ”
Since bats are generally immune to the diseases they carry, Dr. Bill Murphy, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biosciences for Welfare and VMBS Veterinary Medicine, believes that studying bats' immunity to diseases could be key to preventing the next global pandemic.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and outbreak prevention, is a top priority for researchers and the public. "Some bat species are tolerant to viruses that are harmful to human health, which means they become hosts of disease – they carry the virus, but the key is that they don't develop symptoms. ”
To reveal exactly how bats evolved to tolerate these deadly viruses, Foley, Murphy and their international research partners mapped the phylogenetic tree of Myotis bats, which they knew was critical in trying to determine which genes might be involved.
Bats are the second largest genus of mammals, with more than 140 species," Foley said, "and they are almost all over the world, and they carry a wide variety of viruses. ”
To make it more difficult to figure out the relationships between species, Myotisa and other bat species also engage in group behavior when mating.
You can think of group behavior as a kind of social gathering; There is a lot of flying activity, increasing communication and interspecies mixing; For bats, it's no different than going to a club. ”
To complicate matters for the researchers, the colony produced more hybrid species – individual bats with parents from different species. "The problem with Myotis bats is that there are so many species, about 130 species, but they all look similar," Foley said. "It's hard to tell them apart from each other, and hybridization makes it even harder. If we're trying to find out how these bats evolved, so that we can understand their immunity to disease, it's very important to be able to tell who's who. ”
With this in mind, and to create a map of the true relationship between Myotis bats, Foley and Murphy first unraveled the genetic code of the hybrids so that they could more clearly tell which species was which.
"We collaborated with researchers from Ireland, France and Switzerland to sequence the genomes of 60 species of Myotis bats," the study states. "This allows us to figure out which parts of the DNA represent the true evolutionary history of the species and which parts come from hybridization. ”
With this part of the puzzle solved, researchers are finally able to examine the genetic code more closely to understand how it reveals disease immunity.
They found that immune genes are one of the most commonly exchanged genes between populations.
Group behavior has been a mystery to researchers," Foley said, "and now we have a better understanding of why this particular behavior evolved — perhaps to facilitate hybridization, which helps spread beneficial immune gene variants more widely throughout the population." ”
Foley and Murphy's findings opened the door to new questions about the importance of hybridization in evolution.
Hybridization played a much larger role in our discovery than we expected," Foley noted, "These results make us wonder to what extent hybridization has so far obscured genomics' understanding of the evolutionary history of mammals." Now, we want to find other examples of hybridization between mammals and see what we can learn, how they are connected, and even how and why the genome is organized the way it is. ”
*: Journal of Cellular Genomics.
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