Scientists have been sequenced the genome of one of the most common animals in the world: “Asian unicorn”, which has not been seen for more than a decade. The first genetic analysis offers a new hope that the species can be saved from the edge of the disappearance-if it is no longer too late.
Saolo (Pseudoryx nghetinhensisAnd a rolled saw) is the cattle that hangs in the mountain forests of Vietnam and Laos. He has a pair of long, makes the horns on his head and distinctive white markings on his face.
The Asian unicorn manager comes, if not from its horned head, then its exceptional rarity – has not been scientifically described until 1993 and has never been observed personally by scientists or has been studied in the wild. Several dozens were captured by locals, but unfortunately everyone died within months.
Saola is considered critically threatened by the International Union for Nature Protection (IUCN), with approximately a population ranging from 50 to several hundred individuals. But with his latest confirmed monitoring, a camera for camera in 2013 is fertilized that it may have disappeared in the meantime.
Now, an international team of scientists has used skin, hair, bones and other tissue samples to reconstruct the Saola genome for the first time, gathering a reference genome and the sequences of 26 individuals. This allowed the researchers to gather his surprising story, hinting at some potential good news about their chances of conservation.
First, the bad news: Saola’s genetic diversity is in decline from the last Ice Age. In fact, the team estimates that there have been no more than 5,000 people in the last 10,000 years.
The good news, however, is that there seems to be two genetically different populations – north and south. And while genetic diversity decreases in both populations over time, they have lost different sections of their genetic code, which may be crucial for their recovery.
“We were quite surprised to find that Saola was divided into two populations with significant genetic differences. The division happened between 5,000 and 20,000 years,” says Genis Eril, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
“The genetic variation lost in each population adds the other. So if you mix them, they could compensate for what the other is missing.”
Scientists are already working to build a captivity breeding program, but it was not clear whether they would have enough genetic diversity to be viable.
The discovery of the dual population hopes it can just work, and the simulations of various survey scenarios conducted in the study suggest that this can be their best bet.
“If we can collect at least a dozen Saoli-ideally a mix of the two populations-to form the basis of a future population, our models show that the species will have a worthy chance of long-term survival,” says biologist Rasmus Heller of the Copenhagen University.
This, of course, depends on finding enough live specimens – a frightening task, given that it has passed 12 years since even one has been noticed. But the new genetic analysis can help scientists in demand.
“Many researchers are unsuccessfully trying to find traces of Saolo through methods such as the DNA of the environment in water and even in leeches, blood suctioners inhabiting the same habitat,” says Min Duke Le, a zoologist at the National University of Vietnam.
“All these techniques rely on the detection of small DNA fragments and now that we know the full genome of Saola, we have a much more large toolkit to detect these fragments.”
The study has been published in the magazine CageS