WIKIPEDIA, FRITZ GELLER-GRIMMA New York-based team is working to catalog all the world’s mammalian viruses in a proactive effort to prepare for their potential transmission to humans. “We need to know how many unknown viruses there are to understand how much of a threat there is,” study coauthor Peter Daszak from the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance told The Scientist.
The team first counted all the viruses in the Indian flying fox, then extrapolated that result to include all mammals, estimating that the animals harbor at least 320,000 viruses, collectively. Columbia University’s Simon Anthony noted that if his group’s rough estimate holds true, researchers “could feasibly find most of the viruses that exist in mammals in the next 20 years.”
Stanford University’s Nathan Wolfe, who was not involved in the study, said that the research was “very timely, and representative of a new generation of work.”
GARETH JONESWhile bats and dolphins each evolved echolocation systems independently, researchers have uncovered additional evidence of evolutionary convergence across the animals’ genomes. Queen Mary University of London’s Joe Parker and his colleagues scanned the genomes of bats and dolphins in search of genes expressing sequence convergence, finding nearly 200 of them.
An evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the work said she was surprised ...
