Genetic comparison of giant and red pandas offers clues about convergence

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has conducted a comparison of the genomes of giant and red pandas and has found differences due to adaptive convergence. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they sequenced the genome of a wild red panda and the differences they found when comparing it with the giant panda genome.