The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has unique climate and geographical characteristics such as high altitude, low oxygen, cold and strong ultraviolet. In order to adapt to such extreme environment, animals endemic to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has changed dramatically from morphology, physiology and genome level, thus make them good materials to the study of adaptive evolution, especially the research of highland adaptation. In the past decades, the research of highland adaptation mainly focused on single genes, such as HIF-1a and VEGF in yak and plateau pika. Along with the progress of the sequencing technologies and the rapid development of comparative genomics, a good opportunity has been presented to us to investigate highland adaptation from genome level in multiple species.
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