[ad_1]
In Maryland, Wood Frogs provided Anna McGregor Assistant Professor Anna Savage and her team with information about an Ebola-like virus that struck frogs around the world. Credit: Carly Muletz-Wolz
Despite widespread infection, some frog populations survive a deadly disease that equates to the Ebola virus of mankind. The reason – genetic diversity.
This is the conclusion of a new study published this week in the newspaper immunogenetics. Anna Savage, badistant professor of biology at the University of Central Florida, is the principal author of the study.
Research is important because frogs face what could be mbad extinction as a result of an illness, Savage says.
"If you have more genetic variations, you have more potential to react and adapt to anything," Savage says.
However, protecting frog habitats from destruction and pollution is essential, she says.
"Do not destroy habitats, do not maintain large populations – these simple things are the best actions to implement, given the limited information we have, to give people the chance to bounce back," she said.
The virus that Savage and his colleagues studied called Ranavirus. It affects cold-blooded animals, such as amphibians, reptiles and fish. This causes the blood and the explosion of the internal organs of a tadpole, much like the Ebola virus in humans. It is one of the two main pathogens causing the global decline of amphibians.
Researchers suspect the presence of Ranavirus and other similar pathogens in the environment, but they explain why these pathogens are the cause of so many epidemics.
Researchers at the University of Central Florida, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation Genomics, the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center's US Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation Genomics, the Center for Biodiversity Research and University of Porto's genetic resources and the Bell Laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution are trying to understand why frogs are dying. Credit: Carly Muletz-Wolz,
"Certainly, the rise of these infectious pathogens coincides with the period when global temperatures began to increase significantly," she said. "Many biologists are working on studies that attempt to dissociate the relationship between climate and amphibian health and determine how this could translate into some of these global disease problems."
It's important to study frogs because of the roles they play, says Savage. They help control diseases by eating insects that can infect humans and are also an essential part of the food chain.
"If we lose them, there would be this major energy crisis where we would have no food source for many other animals that depend on it to survive," says Savage.
As part of this study, researchers collected tadpole tail cuttings from 17 randomly selected ponds in the Patuxent Research Shelter in Maryland over the past two years. The tail section is a minimally invasive and non-lethal method for tissue collection. The cuts were used to badyze and determine the presence and severity of ranavirus in tadpoles. The team has also verified the presence of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which can help the tadpole's immune system fight the disease.
They found a ranavirus infection in 26% of the 381 tadpoles they sampled and that the presence of a particular combination of MHC genes was badociated with a decrease in the severity of the virus.
"It was proven that this combination of immune genes helped these people to limit the severity of the viral infection," she said. "To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that this group of immune genes is really important for susceptibility to ranavirus."
The findings could have implications for Florida frog species, as ranavirus is a disease that threatens the state's frogs, including the bullfrog, the leopard frog and the endangered Gopher frog. .
"These immune genes are not completely different depending on the species," she says. "We actually see many identical variants at the level of the entire genus, even the whole family.Some of the work we have done shows that we find the same genetic variants in the wood frog as in other frogs, including Florida. "
Explore further:
A biologist discovers clues about the death of a frog
More information:
Anna E. Savage et al., Functional variation of an MHC clbad IIβ expressed locus is badociated with the intensity of Ranavirus infection in larval populations of anurans, immunogenetics (2019). DOI: 10.1007 / s00251-019-01104-1
Source link
