Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 16, 2025

Tissue Collection of Bats for -Omics Analyses and Primary Cell Culture
Published on: October 23, 2019
Long-Read Sequencing Reveals Rapid Evolution of Immunity- and Cancer-Related Genes in Bats
Armin Scheben1, Olivia Mendivil Ramos2, Melissa Kramer2
1Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA.
Abstract:
Bats are exceptional among mammals for their powered flight, extended lifespans, and robust immune systems and therefore have been of particular interest in comparative genomics. Using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies long-read platform, we sequenced the genomes of two bat species with key phylogenetic positions, the Jamaican fruit bat (Artibeus jamaicensis) and the Mesoamerican mustached bat (Pteronotus mesoamericanus), and carried out a comprehensive comparative genomic analysis with a diverse collection of bats and other mammals. The high-quality, long-read genome assemblies revealed a contraction of interferon (IFN)-α at the immunity-related type I IFN locus in bats, resulting in a shift in relative IFN-ω and IFN-α copy numbers. Contradicting previous hypotheses of constitutive expression of IFN-α being a feature of the bat immune system, three bat species lost all IFN-α genes. This shift to IFN-ω could contribute to the increased viral tolerance that has made bats a common reservoir for viruses that can be transmitted to humans. Antiviral genes stimulated by type I IFNs also showed evidence of rapid evolution, including a lineage-specific duplication of IFN-induced transmembrane genes and positive selection in IFIT2. In addition, 33 tumor suppressors and 6 DNA-repair genes showed signs of positive selection, perhaps contributing to increased longevity and reduced cancer rates in bats. The robust immune systems of bats rely on both bat-wide and lineage-specific evolution in the immune gene repertoire, suggesting diverse immune strategies. Our study provides new genomic resources for bats and sheds new light on the extraordinary molecular evolution in this critically important group of mammals.
More Related Videos
10:26Author Spotlight: A Cost-Effective Genomic Workflow for Advancing Rabies Control in Resource-Limited Settings
Published on: August 18, 2023
13:24Integration of Wet and Dry Bench Processes Optimizes Targeted Next-generation Sequencing of Low-quality and Low-quantity Tumor Biopsies
Published on: April 11, 2016
Related Concept Videos
Convergent Evolution
Viral Mutations
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms-SNPs