3 ms·
>“During the metabolic stresses of flight, some of the bat DNA is released into cells, where it doesn’t belong, and normally this would trigger a powerful immun
by Pepe1vo 9y ago
>“During the metabolic stresses of flight, some of the bat DNA is released into cells, where it doesn’t belong, and normally this would trigger a powerful immune response, however [the researchers] have shown that during evolution bats have mutated a key protein in this response called STING.”
This doesn't make sense to me. What is so special about the metabolic stress of flight? Is it different than the stress cheetah cells experience when it runs 100 kph?
- nn3 9y agoFlying needs a lot more energy than running. All flying animals have a lot more muscles compared to body weight than others. And bats fly all night, while Cheetahs only run at best a few minutes per day
- azakai 9y agoMakes sense, but is the same also true for birds then?
- nn3 9y agoThey don't know. It's bleeding edge science and so far the study was only done for bats. Likely other scientists will look into birds now. Birds are only very distantly related to bats (hundreds of millions of years away in evolutionary time) and their last common ancestors didn't fly. There's something called convergent evolution when you have similar problems you come up independently with similar solutions, but then birds are in many ways very different from bats. So it could be that they have a similar mechanism, or they get around the problem in some other way.