HFSP grant awardee Sonja Vernes is a founder of Bat1K which is an international collaboration in bat genomics research. Vernes and her colleagues have achieved a new mile stone in genomics research: the international consortium Bat1K (www.bat1k.com ) has finished the sequencing of six species of bats as high-quality reference genomes.
The teams involved in the project have not only obtained first results about the phylogenetic positioning of bats in the animal kingdom, there is also mounting evidence for bat-specific genes regulating the animals formidable hearing and echolocating capabilities as well as identification of genes that encode historic tolerance of viral infections. These, and future Bat1K genomes, will also help Vernes and colleagues use bats to decipher the biology of vocal learning - a goal of their HFSP program grant to establish bats as mammalian model of vocal learning.
The results were published in Nature and the full press release of the Bat1K consortium can be found here.