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.
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