Retroviruses invaded the genome of koalas with strongly
pathological effects: the viruses weaken the immune defense and threaten the
viability of the already reduced koala population. An international team of
scientists from Europe and North America now applied the technique of
hybridisation capture to analyse the entire genome of koala retroviruses and
used museum samples to monitor its variation across 130 years. The findings
were just published in the scientific online-journal PLOS ONE.