Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play a crucial role in the early defence against invading pathogens, yet our understanding of TLRs in marsupial immunity is limited. Here, we describe the characterisation of nine TLRs from a koala immune tissue transcriptome and one TLR from a draft sequence of the koala genome and the subsequent development of an assay to study genetic diversity in these genes. We s...

Koalas in US zoos were screened for koala retroviruses in an effort to determine the viral mechanism for koala retrovirus induced malignant neoplasias. Although the previously characterized koala retrovirus (KoRV-A) was present in all US koalas, some koalas were also infected by a novel koala retrovirus, termed KoRV-B. The genome of KoRV-B is highly related to KoRV-A; however, certain regions w...

Maintaining genetic diversity is a crucial component in conserving threatened species. For the iconic Australian koala, there is little genetic information on wild populations that is not either skewed by biased sampling methods (e.g., sampling effort skewed toward urban areas) or of limited usefulness due to low numbers of microsatellites used. The ability to genotype DNA extracted from koala ...

Marsupials are an infraclass of mammals living primarily in Australasia and the New World. Well-known marsupials include kangaroos, wallabies, koala, possums, opossums, wombats and the Tasmanian devil. Three species, the koala, wombat and wallaby were chosen for this study. Three Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), two wombat (Vombatus ursinus) and three Grey’s wallaby (Macropus greyi) mandibles, w...

Cellulose degrading bacteria from koala faeces were isolated using caboxymethylcellulose-Congo red agar, screened in vitro for different hydrolytic enzyme activities and phylogenetically characterized using molecular tools. Bacillus sp. and Pseudomonas sp. were the most prominent bacteria from koala faeces. The isolates demonstrated good xylanase, amylase, lipase, protease, tannase and lignin p...

This paper describes MoPy, a port of the Python 1.5.2 interpreter to the Psion 5/Epoc32 platform and Koala, a CORBA-style Object Request and Event Broker implemented natively in Python. While primarily a direct POSIX-based port of the standard Python interpreter, MoPy also adds thread, socket and serial support for the Psion platform. The Koala ORB is designed particularly with MoPy in mind and...

Koala populations in Australia are declining due to threats such as chlamydiosis, wild dog predation and vehicle collision. In the last decade, grazing livestock emerged anecdotally a threat koala survival areas where habitat land overlap. This is first study investigating significance of livestock-inflicted injuries deaths over large spatial temporal scale. We investigated outcome, scale, freq...

background and purpose: superficial mycotic infections have been only poorly described in koalas and there are no reliable mycologically confirmed data regarding clinical isolation of dermatophytes in this animal. we report an 11-yearold female koala, kept in a zoo in tokyo, japan, and presenting with hyperkeratotic lesions and scaly plaques on forepaw claws and pads reminiscent of fungal infec...