According to a news release from the University of Colorado at Denver, scientists who sequenced the genome of the Burmese python have found great quantities of very quickly evolved genes in snakes.

These genetic alterations are associated with extreme features in snakes, like rapid increases in metabolism and organ development after eating, discoveries that reveal a lot about how evolution functions at the molecular level.

“The bottom line is that snakes have undergone incredible changes at all levels of their biology, from the physiological to the molecular,” noted David Pollock, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the CU School of Medicine, in a statement. “Snakes appear to have functionally evolved much more than other species. They are a crucible of evolution.”

Pollock and his colleagues discovered that snakes contain big quantities of proteins with signatures for positive selection in their ancestors.

“One of the fundamental questions of evolutionary biology is how vertebrates with all the same genes display such vastly different characteristics,” posited lead author Todd Castoe, a former postdoctoral fellow at the CU School of Medicine now at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The Burmese python is a great way to study that because it is so extreme. We’d like to know how snakes uses genes we all have to do things no other vertebrate can do.”

Extreme features of the snake like metabolism, spine and skull shape and cell cycle regulation are associated with positive selection in hundreds of genes.

“When you have positive selection you have a lot of adaptation going on,” Pollock remarked. “Positive selection is rare, but when it happens we are curious. What we are seeing in snakes is unprecedented.”

These numerous adaptive developments led to evolutionary redesign of many proteins in the snake.

The researchers also discovered that after Burmese pythons consumed a meal, they dealt with large alterations in gene expression associated with 35 to 100 percent size increases in their heart, small intestine, liver and kidneys in one to two days.

During this time, the snake’s metabolism increased notably.

“Genes that were fully off are now full on,” Pollock posited. “Snakes eat animals as big as themselves. Once they catch something that size, they need to digest it quickly before it rots in their stomach, and they have to turn a lot of genes on to do it.”

The discoveries not only provide information on how evolution functions at the molecular level but they also have meanings for humans.

“What we are seeing now can apply to people,” Pollock concluded. “We can link mutations to physiological effects and perhaps find a way to stop those mutations before they cause disease. There are any number of possibilities and we are only starting to unravel them.”

The study’s findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.