Molecular Biology in the Evolution of Bats: A Historical Perspective

The North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) was born in 1970 with the first Symposium on Bat Research, with 42 attendees and 26 presentations in Tucson, Arizona. The topics discussed in the earlier NASBR meetings were focused mostly on behavior, ecology, physiology, and taxonomy. It was not until the fourth annual symposium that Dr. Vincent M. Sarich presented the first talk on the use of molecular biology to infer phylogeny in bats. During the last 50 years, this subject has expanded rapidly with innovative techniques. Nowadays, it is widely used to understand the evolution of bat species. In this chapter, we discuss how molecular biology has contributed to bat systematics and evolutionary biology from immunological assays performed by Sarich to the use of Sanger sequencing and next generation sequencing that has allowed the assembly of whole genomes, transcriptomes, and viromes. We provide a chronology of how research in molecular biology has gained importance in the study of bat biology from one single presentation in 1973 to whole sessions in more recent NASBR meetings.