We didn’t even have a human genome at that time!” “I never would have guessed then that I would one day work on their genome. “I went to Komodo Island years ago as a tourist, and I saw Komodo dragons in the wild there,” said Katherine Pollard, PhD, a senior investigator and the director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology, who is the other senior author of the study. “At the time, other groups had sequenced the turtle genome, snake and bird genomes, and the crocodile genome was in process, but the missing branch was the varanid lizards-the family to which Komodo dragons belong.” “We started the project 9 years ago to look at how genomes evolve, but to do so, we needed the genome sequences first,” said Gladstone Senior Investigator Benoit Bruneau, PhD, a senior author of the study.
Now, a new study from researchers at the Gladstone Institutes, in a close collaboration with scientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and Zoo Atlanta, provides the first high-resolution sequence of the Komodo dragon, as well as insight into how it evolved. However, scientists have understood little about how the DNA of these remarkable lizards encodes such astounding characteristics. And although they are cold-blooded, they can ramp up their metabolism to near mammalian levels, which gives them great speed and endurance.
These predators weighing up to 200 pounds can detect their prey from up to 7.5 miles away. The Komodo dragons are the largest lizards in the world.
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