Panda Genome

Courtesy of T Abele:

I read a very interesting article in science news that pertained to a very unique anima, the panda bear. This article was published on December 13,2009. Laura Sanders wrote the article. The name of this piece is “Panda Genome Unveiled.”

The article focuses on a female white and black panda named “Jingjing.” Her recent DNA discovery helps scientists and researchers understand why pandas tend to have such picky diets and therefore can help in the efforts of saving this “endangered species.”

A group of scientists made a discovery of the fact that the panda’s genome is in fact smaller than humans. An interesting fact was that pandas have 21,000 genes for encoding proteins and humans have almost the same amount.

By understanding how these genes work, scientists also made another discovery. This was discovering that inbreeding was not the case for jingjing. Inbreeding is a method that scares scientists because it is unnatural to the animal and harmful to the panda population. Saunders wrote“ Jingjing’s two copies of DNA in each of her cells differed in many places, demonstrating a surprisingly high rate of heterozygosity.” The term heterozygosity means a presence of different alleles at one or more loci on homologous chromosomes. This discovery has caused scientists to believe that the inbreeding is not the main cause of the small population of pandas that is reaching extinction.

By researching jingjing’s genes scientists have learned the rate at which pandas “ genetic makeup” changes. The rate is very little and one scientist in the article compared pandas to a “living fossil.”

This discovery of the genetic makeup leads to the understanding of why pandas have such a picky diet consisting mainly of bamboo. “T1R1 “ is a gene that was decoded. This gene does not allow pandas to taste certain food groups such as meat and broths. This explains their dislike for other foods, it does not appeal to them. Scientists also discovered that pandas are in fact capable of digesting meat and that bamboo is actually harder to digest.

The article concludes that the discovery of these new genes can help the panda population. The more we understand about these mammals the more we can help the population and try to limit extinction.