📢 New #preprint alert 📢
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.18.689136v1

Several lineages of #birds and #mammals appear to have independently gained or lost the ability to enter #torpor. 🧵1/4

To this day, it is not clear whether such evolutionary shifts in torpor occur through similar genetic paths or if lineages can reach #torpor in different ways. To answer this question, we performed several screens across 190 #genomes of placental #mammals. 🧵2/4
These revealed a low explanatory power of individual protein-coding #genes for evolutionary shifts in #torpor. In contrast, there is relatively stronger evidence for evolutionary convergence at the level of #pathways. 🧵3/4
Overall, these results suggest the existence of several genetic paths towards the #evolution of #torpor in placental #mammals. 🧵4/4