bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.07.398529; this version posted December 7, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Evolutionary loss of inflammasomes in carnivores to facilitate carriage of zoonotic infections Z. Digby1, J. Rooney1, J.P. Boyle1, B. Bibo-Verdugo2, R. Pickering5, S.J. Webster1, T.P. Monie1, L.J. Hopkins1,5, N. Kayagaki3, G.S. Salvesen2, S. Warming4, L. Weinert1 and C.E. Bryant1,5* Affiliations: 1. Department of Veterinary Medicine, The University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB30ES, UK 2. Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, 10901 North Torrey Pines, La Jolla, CA, USA 92037 3. Department of Physiological Chemistry, Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, California 94080, USA. 4. Department of Molecular Biology, Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, California 94080, USA. 5. University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Box 111, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, CB2 0SP, UK *Correspondence to:
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.07.398529; this version posted December 7, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Summary Zoonotic infections, such as COVID-19, reside in animal hosts before jumping species to humans. The Carnivora, like mink, carry many zoonoses yet how diversity in host immune genes across species impact upon pathogen carriage are poorly understood. Here we describe a progressive evolutionary downregulation of pathogen sensing inflammasome pathways in Carnivora.