bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/449553; this version posted October 31, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 The genome of the plague-resistant great gerbil reveals species-specific 2 duplication of an MHCII gene 3 Pernille Nilsson1*, Monica H. Solbakken1, Boris V. Schmid1, Russell J. S. Orr2, Ruichen Lv3, 4 Yujun Cui3, Yajun Song3, Yujiang Zhang4, Nils Chr. Stenseth1,5, Ruifu Yang3, Kjetill S. Jakobsen1, 5 W. Ryan Easterday1 & Sissel Jentoft1 6 7 1 Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo 8 2 Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 9 3 State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and 10 Epidemiology, Beijing 100071, China 11 4 Xinjiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Urumqi, China 12 5 Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System 13 Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China 14 * Corresponding author,
[email protected] 15 16 Abstract 17 The great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is a social rodent living in permanent, complex burrow 18 systems distributed throughout Central Asia, where it serves as the main host of several 19 important vector-borne infectious diseases and is defined as a key reservoir species for 20 plague (Yersinia pestis). Studies from the wild have shown that the great gerbil is largely 21 resistant to plague but the genetic basis for resistance is yet to be determined.