A whole lineage of French rabbits has been in low hands for almost a century. According to one document, acrobatic bunnies do not make a call as much as a product of retarded genetics. published this week at PLOS Genetics.
First discovered in domesticated rabbit living in a Parisian suburb in 1935, the recessive trait is the product of a genetic mutation that could have it has been hidden in the genetic code of animals for generations, only on the surface then. It is not a superpower. The rabbit variety: the “sauteur d’Alfort,”Or“ the Alfort jumper ”: he is also more likely to develop cataracts and become blind.
“The strain has been maintained since then to study ocular malformations and pathological locomotion,” co-author Miguel Carneiro, a geneticist at the University of Porto in Portugal, said in an email. “Rabbits carrying this mutation could not survive long in nature because of its harmful effects.”
Rabbits walk on all fours when they move slowly, but quickly, they turn to the foot of the hand method. Now, a team of geneticists has identified the root of all these problems in the Race DNA.
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To find out the origins of the animal’s abnormalities, the team of geneticists and developmental biologists bred the Alfort jumper with rabbits that jumped normally and sequenced the DNA of their offspring. They found that rabbits that ended up bipedal had a mutation on the first chromosome; specifically, a deformed gene called RORB, which expresses a protein of the same name.
“With modern technology, it’s easy to go from a simple recessive disorder to finding genes,” co-author Leif Andersson, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a video call. “The expectation was that there was something wrong with the spinal cord, because they do not coordinate the forelegs and the hind legs ”.
Among Alfort’s jumping rabbits (perhaps a misnomer, since the bunnies have no hops), it was shown to be true. The RORB protein is a transcription factor, meaning it has a hand in several genes, which end up being expressed in traits. Proteins are normally produced in inhibitory interneurons that cease to communicate through the body. (Imagine an operator refuses to answer your calls.) In the rarewalking rabbits, interneurons were less present or completely absent, and, in the latter case, the rabbits would flex their hind legs, making them unable to jump.
“What happens when you move is that you have these neurons firing all the time and they coordinate muscle contractions and get feedback on the balance of the different limbs,” Andersson said. “This coordination of muscle contraction is not correct in these rabbits.”
It may be thought that the rabbit in the hands of rabbits is not in itself the mutation, but a solution to an otherwise debilitating inhibition of the iconic means of locomotion of the animal. Andersson said the two-foot locomotion did not cause pain to the animals of which he was aware.
It is not the only animal that experiences interruption of gait due to genetic mutations. A similar behavior was seen in mice with a RORB mutation i previous work of Andersson found that a mutation in the DMRT3 gene alters the gait of mice and horses. (Interestingly, it is this mutation at work when they look at the different gait patterns of certain horse breeds, from Tennessee Walkers to Louisiana Fox Trotters.)
Tfondness for genetic science, these mysteries can be deciphered at microscopic scales and could help better understand the communication centers of our spinal cord (human) for future medical research.