A comprehensive annotation and differential expression analysis of short and long non-coding RNAs in 16 bat genomes

Nelly Mostajo Berrospi; Marie Lataretu; Sebastian Krautwurst; Florian Mock; Daniel Desirò; Kevin Lamkiewicz; Maximilian Collatz; Andreas Schoen; Friedemann Weber; Manja Marz; Martin Hölzer

For example, bats are the suspected reservoirs for some of the deadliest viral diseases such as Ebola and SARS [12] [13] [14] , but appear to be asymptomatic and survive the infection. Possibly, the solution to better understand and fight these pathogens lies in the uniquely developed immune system of bats. 15, 16 . Studying bats and their genomes is likely to have high impacts on various scientific fields, including healthy ageing, immune and ecosystem functioning, the evolution of sensory perception and human communication, and mammalian genome architecture (see the recent Bat1K review for further details 2 ). Despite the unique biological characteristics of these flying mammals and their important role as natural reservoirs for viruses, bats are one of the least studied taxa of all mammalian 17 . Accordingly, there is little knowledge about the non-protein-coding transcriptome of bats, which plays a crucial role in an extensive number of cellular and regular functions and comprises a very diverse family of untranslated RNA molecules 18, 19 . In addition, it is believed that due to the early evolutionary radiation of bats (compared to other mammals) their innate and acquired immune responses have a different set of molecules 1 .