Population bottlenecks cause decline of mammals' immunity, researchers find

Population bottlenecks cause decline of mammals' immunity, researchers find

Population bottlenecks caused by stark population loss due to illness or habitat destruction caused mammals' disease immunity to decline, according to a new study led by computational biologists in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The finding comes from the first comparative study of genomic sequences—roadmaps of DNA instructions responsible for encoding how the body works—encoding immunity in 46 mammals.