THE FUSE

Vesper bats, a family of more than 500 species found on every continent except Antarctica, carry two complete sets of the genes that build antibody heavy chains. Every other mammal examined closely has one. The arrangement was reported in a study in Science Advances by a team from Tulane University working with Stanford University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it has a consequence that reaches past evolutionary biology: the blood tests used to estimate how many bats have been exposed to a virus may not be capturing the full antibody response.