Interaction between bird's flying and genome size
Interaction between bird's flying and genome size
Introduction
The group bird is amniotes that have smallest genomes. Genome range of mammal and reptilian is between 1.0 and 8.2 giga base pairs. Compare to this, bird’s genome is only 0.91 giga base pair. Also intron of bird is 2.1kb long while average size of mammal and reptilian intron is 4.3kb and 3.1kb. Generally, scientists expect that it is because of loss of weight to increase flying ability. Then how can we prove this hypothesis?
Eric Waltari and Scott V.Edrwards have one experiment to prove this. They measure basal metabolic rate of 19 flighted and flightless birds.
Result
This experiment shows that genome size and intron size have significant interaction between BMR(factor that shows metabolically costly behaviors such as flight) The birds have higher BMR shows lower intron size and genome size.
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Discussion
Experiment shows that genome size has strong interaction with BMR.
It depend the hyphothesis that 'The reason why bird genome is smaller than mammals, is natural selection for flying.'
Reference
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4390078/
