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/
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.
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.+
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.+
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.
