By Mark Brown, Wired UK

American conservationists have sequenced the genome of the Tasmanian devil to help beat a vicious cancer that's made the marsupial an endangered species.

[partner id="wireduk" align="right"]The toothy critter has been ravaged by Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) for the past 15 years. The cancerous pox took hold of the devil species in the late 1990s, and by 2009 the stocky marsupial was declared to be endangered.

The disease spreads like a virus, manifesting as a cancer which spreads from animal to animal by mating, biting or even touching. "Just imagine a human cancer that spread through a handshake," said Pennsylvania State professor Stephan Schuster in a press release. "It would eradicate our species very quickly."

The plan is to put a handful of healthy devils that are genetically resistant to DFTD into "protective custody" at Tasmanian or Australian zoos. Once the disease has run its course, conservationists can reintroduce the captive animals into the wild and kick-start the population.

"However, it's not just a matter of scooping up a few individuals at random and locking them away," explained Webb Miller, another professor at Penn State, in the release. To make sure that the devil dream-team is both healthy and genetically diverse, the team decided to sequence the animal's genome.

They took two devils – Cedric, a northwestern critter with natural resistance to two strains of DFTD, and Spirit, a southeastern devil who had died from the disease in the wild – and analyzed their DNA. That's 3.2 billion base pairs each, as well as the genome of one of Spirit's tumors.

This data allowed the team to create a model which could determine the individual animals that should be selected for the breeding programs. It not only identifies which animals are immune to the cancer, but finds animals that represent the broadest genetic diversity possible – to maintain the devil's already low variety.

"It might seem you'd want to choose only those individuals that are genetically resistant to the DFTD cancer," Schuster said in the release. But this would select a tiny subset of the gene pool. "Instead, you want to develop a pool of diverse, healthy individuals that can fight future maladies or even pathogens that have not yet evolved."

Images: Penn State Department of Public Information 1) An infant Tasmanian devil. 2) Zoo keeper and breeder Tim Faulkner holds a Tasmanian devil, an endangered marsupial found in the wild in the Australian island-state of Tasmania.

Source: Wired.co.uk

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