Wednesday 11 April 2018

Genome assembly of donkey reveals clues on how it may have branched from horse



April 9, 2018 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org report

A team of researchers from Denmark, Malaysia, France and the U.K. has conducted a genome assembly of the donkey to learn more about its evolutionary history. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their study and what they found.

While the horse is well recognized by most people, the same cannot be said for the lowly donkey. This is likely due to some confusion regarding how it fits in with other horse-like animals. Scientifically speaking, the donkey is one of many of the asses. Mating a donkey with a horse can result in the birth of a mule (from a male donkey and a female horse) or a hinny (a female donkey and a male horse). As the researchers with this new effort note, a lot of genetic research has been done on the horse, but very little on the donkey. They have sought to rectify that situation by conducting a high-quality genome assembly of the donkey genome.

As part of their effort, the researchers created scaffolds, which are spans of genetic details, that are a factor of four higher than any other previous effort with donkeys. The amount of data was massive, filling 10 megabytes. But it also revealed a lot about donkeys, such as their history, including their split from the group that now includes the modern horse, going back approximately 4 million years. They also observed chromosomal rearrangements such as translocations and inversions, which will reveal more about how the donkey species diverged and separated from others.

Both horses and donkeys belong to the equid family, which prior research has shown have been around for approximately 55 million years. But today, the researchers note, just one member of the family remains, Equus. It includes both horses and donkeys, and also three kinds of zebras and other ass species. Asses, notably, split off from others in the family nearly two million years ago—the new sequencing results push the accepted date back approximately 200,000 years. Donkeys, the researchers note, were domesticated approximately 5,000 years ago.

No comments:

Post a Comment

You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis