Lost Genes Explain Vampire Bats’ Diet of Blood
Vampire bats—and their legendary taste for blood—are the stuff of nightmares. “Essentially they are living Draculas,” says Michael Hiller, a genomicist at the LOEWE Center for Translational Biodiversity Genomics in Frankfurt, Germany. These tiny bats, which reside in forests and caves throughout Central and South America and often prey on livestock, are the only mammals that feed exclusively on blood.
Scientists have long been puzzled over how vampire bats survive on such a paltry diet. In an attempt to answer this question, Hiller and his colleagues recently plunged into the genetics of these legendary bloodsuckers using state-of-the-art sequencing techniques. They pieced together and analyzed the genome of the common vampire bat and compared it with the genomes of 26 other bat species, hoping to pinpoint the specific genes that help vampire bats stomach blood.
The ramifications of these deleted genes are evident everywhere, from the bats’ brain to their intestines. Some deletions were responsible for reducing insulin secretion, which is less important, thanks to the animals’ low-sugar diet. Others reduced the amounts of sweet and bitter taste receptors, making the bats less sensitive to the noxious taste of the blood they lap up.
Another lost gene, called REP15, was once responsible for keeping iron in the bats’ bloodstream and out of their intestines. Without this stopgap in place, iron is able to seep into the cells along the intestinal wall. But the researchers hypothesize that this seeping is actually good for the bats.
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