Date: February 14, 2019
Source: Arizona State University
As most know
already, rabbit populations are not easily controlled -- they reproduce
swiftly, and as a result, they have a severe impact on their environment. This
was the case when European settlers introduced the wild European rabbit to
Australia in the late 19th century. In an attempt to reduce the population size
that had grown to almost a billion rabbits by 1950, Australian scientists
released the myxoma virus -- a virus known to be deadly to rabbits at the time-
to the rabbit population, and eventually did the same for populations in France
and the UK. However, after some time, fatality rates lessened in all three
countries, and the rabbit populations rebounded but were now genetically more
resistant to the virus.
Regarded as
"one of the greatest natural experiments in evolution," researchers
naturally wanted to learn more, so they tackled the genetic basis of the newly
resistant rabbit adaptation to this virus.
Partnering
with the University of Cambridge and several other research institutes,
Biodesign researchers, as part of Grant McFadden's Center of for Immunotherapy,
Vaccines and Virotherapy, validated the role of specific rabbit genes in
contributing to this acquired resistance in research published in Science.
McFadden's
lab has many decades of expertise in the myxoma virus, studying subjects
ranging from the virus's replication in hosts to its potential use in treating
cancer. For this project, they were tasked with determining whether certain
rabbit genes that had changed in the 70 years of exposure to the virus were
responsible for the rabbits' acquired resistance to the virus.
"There
are rabbits in each population that evolved at the same time but independently
of each other," McFadden said. "The idea was to sequence examples of
many rabbit genomes of all three places and see what they have in common, and
that's what led to this study. We came up with half a dozen gene variations in
common -- our job was to determine whether these variants of genes affected
that virus in a lab setting."
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