Bat1K

The findings could also help scientists better understand some of bats' most unusual traits, including flight, echolocation, longevity, and their remarkable ability to resist disease.

Professor Emma Teeling of UCD, one of the world's leading bat researchers, co-founder of the Bat1K Consortium, and one of the lead authors of the study, joins us now.

Emma, you're very welcome to the program.

It's great to talk to you.

Now, the reason why we wanted to do this was we wanted then to line up those DNA spellings, basically, and use that to understand which bat was more closely related to which other bat.

And the, the, the, the hypotheses are that if the DNA is spelled the same way, they're more closely related to each other.

So to do this, uh, myself and Sonja Vernes, she's a co-director of Bat1K, we decided that we wanted to seq-- we wanted to make a big consortium to sequence the genome of every single living bat species.

Now, there's about fifteen hundred of them in the world that are currently recognized.

... that we didn't see before.

And we have, with the Bat1K project, um, that Emma Teeling is running, she's trying to sequence over 100...

No, s- sorry, 1,000 bat genomes, and they now have, I think, over 150.

Uh, and-

Number one uni in Australia- Yeah ... as of the last rankings.

And it was all part of something called Bat1K, which is an initiative to sequence- [laughs] Jesus ...

the genomes of all 1,500 or so- Yeah ... species of bats that are alive today.

Hmm.

So this will have big ripple effects through the next phase of bat research and ecological research all around the world, uh, which is amazing to see.

Uh, and, uh, they also were able to sort of rebuild a lot of the r- the genome of the last common ancestor of all bats around 65 million years ago and have an idea of what that might have looked like.

Uh, and also are hoping that this research, this, this Bat1K project this is a part of, mapping all the genomes of these bats, will be able to give us some insights not just in the history of bats, but also in s- some of the secrets of bats.

Because bats ha- buck the trend of mammals.

It's just ticked over 1,000.

And then as a subgroup of that, there's this so-called BAT1K project.

So funnily enough, they're out to sequence about 1,000 bats, and they've sequenced in this instance just over 100 different bat species.

And that work, so I was engaged in that work partly actually through the work I think we might have previously discussed on the Tuatara genome.

And they also live a long time, defying the basic rule of biology that says that small animals have short lives.

So even though bats have a bit of a bad reputation in some parts of the world, they are fascinating creatures for scientists to study, which is why a group of 137 scientists in 64 countries launched Bat1K, an initiative to sequence the genomes of all living bat species to understand more about these unusual adaptations.

This week, they released phase one of this undertaking, which is in itself the largest bat genome and fossil study ever published.

Canadian biologist Dr. Burton Lim is part of the Bat1K team.

He's the assistant curator of mammals at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Hello, and welcome to our program.

Hello, and thank you very much.

First of all, what was your role in this Bat1K project?