But there are some other really cool things about them.” “The most obvious one is they are gigantic. “We wanted to particularly look at different unique traits,” Dr. With the help of other lizard genomes, the researchers made predictions about the genes’ roles. Using algorithms that helped parse which parts of the sequence coded for proteins, Dr. Pollard’s lab, focused on the process of interpreting the genome. But more recently, Abigail Lind, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. The group cobbled together a draft genome from two dragons living at Zoo Atlanta some years ago, and used tissue from a dragon in the Prague National Zoo to flesh it out. Their analysis offers insights into the dragons’ blood, senses and other unique aspects of their anatomy. In a paper published last week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, she and her colleagues present the lizards’ genome, revealing evidence of a large number of mutations in important Komodo genes. She wondered what the Komodo dragons’ genome would reveal about their biology and evolution. It’s one example of the odd batch of traits that have fascinated scientists, including Katherine Pollard, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as a researcher at the Gladstone Institutes. That suggests that at some point, they evolved a resistance to their own anticoagulants. Even a single bite can be enough to seal the prey’s fate, because a dragon’s saliva contains potent anticoagulants: Once the bleeding starts, it doesn’t stop.īut when Komodo dragons bite each other, which they do with some frequency, they do not bleed out the way their prey do. They detect their prey, including deer and water buffalo, from miles away with an exquisite sense of smell, and at close range, they race at terrifying speeds. Komodo dragons are the largest lizards on the planet, with some adults measured at more than 350 pounds and longer than 10 feet.
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