In early spring 2015, 3-year-old meerkat Jeffrey was in his usual perch, paws together, black-tipped nose held high, happily eating, fighting with his siblings, and visiting the zoo. I was looking at the people. But one day in April, zookeepers found him in his enclosure so weak he could barely lift his head. By the time he was taken to the head veterinarian at Stone Zoo in Massachusetts, Eric Beichman, Jeffrey was losing consciousness. Bachman shoved a straw-sized tube down the patient’s throat to help him breathe.revealed by ultrasound examination failed heart.
Eight days later, despite strict medication, Jeffrey died. And within his next three years, both of Jeffrey’s brothers and his two of his three remaining meerkats at the zoo would die in a similar manner.
All three brothers were diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a serious condition in which the heart muscle weakens and expands, impairing the heart’s ability to pump blood. Before Jeffrey, Bachman had never seen the disease in meerkats, so he wondered if the Stone Zoo family was just a fluke. If not, he thought, perhaps the disease had a genetic cause. Finding meerkats may be the key to saving future generations of meerkats, or people with similar heart defects.
Beichman, a member of Zoo New England’s leadership team, reached out to other zoos with meerkat families, and soon began hearing a chorus of “Yes, us too.” Michael Garner, the pathologist who examined Jeffrey’s heart, saw the same pattern. For years, veterinarians across the country have been sending him malformed meerkat hearts. Many meerkat hearts, normally the diameter of a walnut, had now swollen to the size of a large apricot. A 2017 analysis by Garner found that about a quarter of meerkat deaths in U.S. zoo pathology databases were related to some type of heart disease, the most common cause. seemed to be DCM.
Everything Batchman has learned since then about how the disease develops in meerkats points to his original hunch that “it must be mostly genetic,” he said. . He has worked with a team of genomics experts to collect dozens of tissue samples from meerkats in zoos across the United States for genetic analysis over the past few years. The research team is still analyzing the 86 genomes they have collected, but they have not yet identified any genes clearly associated with DCM. But Vanderbilt University geneticist Alexander Bich, one of Beichman’s collaborators, said he expected it to occur because the disease is so easily transmitted. If a meerkat parent infects just one of her offspring, about half of her offspring will also become infected.
Bick is interested in meerkat hearts in part because DCM is one of the most common cardiomyopathy in humans. take the lead The reason for heart transplant. Although the condition can be managed with drugs and implants, many people still end up with heart failure. And although genetics are thought to play a role in the majority of human DCM cases, only about one-third of them Bick said he has a mutation known to be associated with the disease. As families have shrunk in recent decades, it has become difficult to track common genetic errors using traditional methods of mapping the presence of disease within sprawling family trees. specific populations of wild meerkats, Inbred for generations, it seems like you have almost the opposite problem. The meerkat population in American zoos also appears to be broadly comprised of all of the following: half cousinBased on scientists’ best estimates, “essentially everything is part of one giant family tree,” Bick told me.
In recent years, elucidating the genomes of other animals has proven to be significantly useful for human medicine. dog genome Helped researchers better understand humans diseases of the respiratory tract, pain disorder, cancer, birth defectsand sleep hindrance; research in rhesus macaques has provided insight into the genes that influence it. alcohol consumption and Endometriosis. The next big cure for the deadly neurological disease Tay-Sachs could come from genetic research in cats.
There is no guarantee that meerkat genetics will reveal anything about our meerkats.genome of be variety of doghas similarly developed DCM and is actively searching for clues about the disease. However, the genes underlying his DCM in canine teeth are almost no overlap People and veterinary cardiologist Katie Nadolny. Study DCM with Meerkatshe told me.
And meerkats are not as well understood as dogs. Rachel Johnston, a genomics expert at the Broad Institute and New England Zoo who collaborates with Beichman, said researchers don’t know much about what a healthy heart looks like in a wild meerkat. , he said. They are also uncertain about how common DCM is in nature. In the wild, many meerkats live in more diverse populations, have a more varied diet, and are more likely to die from infection, predation, or simply because they are “notoriously murderous,” Jenny said. To tell. Tung, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who studies the genetics of wild meerkats, told me. A natural next step is to ask how much the captive populations differ. These questions may not be of benefit to humans or even meerkats outside of zoos. But whatever answers the researchers discover could save meerkat minds like Jeffrey’s before they quietly fail.