Advances in genome sequencing are giving researchers a more detailed look at how the Tibetan hot-spring snake has adapted to its extreme environment.
Jia-Tang Li knows firsthand how tough life can be on the Tibetan Plateau. The air at 4500 meters is so thin that just a few steps take one’s breath away. Despite bitter cold, the Sun is intense enough to quickly burn the skin. Yet the small grayish-brown snakes this herpetologist at the Chengdu Institute of Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences studies have been thriving in the plateau’s northern reaches for millions of years.
Between 2015 and 2018, Li led teams to the plateau to capture snakes and collect blood or small bits of tissue from the tip of the tail for sequencing studies. Because the snakes are rare and typically active only between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.—if the Sun is out—the researchers could go days without seeing one, Li recalls.
“These snakes are probably walking a really fine line between not freezing to death and not boiling,” Castoe points out. The threat of scalding seems to have shaped other genes: Li’s group found heat shock proteins, which repair proteins damaged by heat, have undergone accelerated evolution in the hot-spring snakes.
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