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SYDNEY (Reuters) – Scientists who have mapped the genome of Australia's symbolic animal, the Koala, say that it's a good thing. It could help them develop better vaccines to treat animals, which are battling an epidemic of bacterial chlamydia.
The development will also help scientists bypass the invasive procedures in the study of marsupial biology, whose exact numbers are not known, but that groups of wildlife and 180 000. [19659002] Researchers at the Koala Genome Consortium, a team of 54 Australian and international scientists, said that they sequenced more than 3.4 billion base pairs and more than 26,000 genes in the koala genome, slightly bigger than the human one.
"We are in an excellent position now to develop better vaccines to treat them," said Katherine Belov, a professor of comparative genomics at the University of Sydney.
Belov and his colleagues published their research in Nature Genetics on Monday.
Untreated, chlamydia infections can lead to blindness, severe bladder inflammation, infertility, and death in koalas.
Antibiotic treatment often makes it difficult for koalas to digest eucalyptus leaves
. "Over time, we will really understand why some animals cure chlamydia and why others do not, and this will help us develop therapies to treat koalas," said Belov
. species in a conservation measure in 2012.
(Report by Stefica Nicol Bikes, Editor: Colin Packham, edited by Darren Schuettler and Clarence Fernandez)
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