Collaborative project

An ever increasing threat to the koala is disease, with most populations now suffering from chlamydiosis and the recent discovery of a retrovirus that is spreading through Australia’s koala populations in real time and which may result in malignant neoplasias. Comprehensive understanding of both immune response to Chlamydia and invasion of the genome by a retrovirus has not been possible using the previously available short read only, genomic data, due to the highly duplicated nature of key immune gene clusters, such as the MHC, and the difficulties in assembling across retroviral insertion sites. Therefore, we chose to use PacBio sequencing to spearhead this research.