Sloths are the slowest mammals on the planet and now we know why. Scientists have sequenced the two-toed sloth genome and found ‘jumping genes’ linked to their extremely slow metabolism 🦥
Read more here ⤵️
https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/why-are-sloths-so-slow-its-in-their-dna/
Por qué el ADN del perezoso de dos dedos cambió lo que se sabía sobre el metabolismo mamífero www.infobae.com/america/cien...
Paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The word on the street is, that someone might be organising a virtual biannual Diptera Comparative Genomics symposium to facilitate knowledge exchange and foster collaborations. Let me know, if you would you be interested in joining the community and possibly contribute to papers such the one below.
An excellent two day @royalsociety.org meeting packed with discussion about how pangenomics is revolutionising evolutionary biology. Thank you to all the amazing speakers and attendees who contributed to the rich discussions and @henrylnorth.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social for co-organising!
Wellcome Sanger Institute
Because the genome is the instruction manual for complex cells and tissues, it is generally stable and conserved over evolutionary time. There are, however, several ways DNA changes and evolves, and one of them is through the activity of repetitive elements that insert new material into genomes.+
Our sloth genomics paper made it to the BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/ar...
In this work we found that:
1-) Sloths have an abundance of active LINE-1 sub-families.
2-) C. didactylus sloth is the mammal w/ the largest number of retrocopies ever described.
3-) We identified sloth-specific insertions that appeared in the lineage leading to the LCA of all living sloths.+
4-) Several of these show strong signals of domestication, many of them related to mitochondria and metabolism.
Very proud of this work! We are now continuing to investigate the impact of active LINE-1s in sloths and the possible functions of these domesticated retrocopies.+
A huge thanks to all my co-authors, especially Camila Mazzoni, who hosted me as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow where it all started, Pedro Galante and Helena Conceiçāo, who are retrocopy experts and were more than excited to do a deep dive into Xenarthran and sloth biology with me.
High quality genomes for sloths and anteaters and great mammalian biology findings alert! 🦥🧬 @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @ebpgenome.bsky.social @vertebrategenomes.bsky.social
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Marcela Uliano-Silva
Background Xenarthrans, comprising sloths, anteaters, and armadillos, represent one of the most morphologically and physiologically specialized mammalian clades, yet the genomic basis of their adaptat...
A big preprint from my group!
Muller Elements are considered to be conserved in flies. We tested it by reconstructing the ancestral dipteran karyotype using 340 chromosomal genomes and suprise suprise, they're not...
Led by @juliagries.bsky.social and Sam Ebdon. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵👇
KamilSJaron.bsky.social
La investigación internacional identifica mecanismos evolutivos que abren nuevas vías en la búsqueda de terapias médicas y el análisis de la eficiencia biológica humana
