Researchers at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences have put forward the viewpoint for the first time that adaptive functional evolution may occur in the leptin protein of the pika (Ochotona) family, a typical cold-adaptive mammal. They speculated that the cold, rather than hypoxia, may be the primary environmental factor that drives the adaptive evolution of pika leptin. This study is published in the January 23 issue of PLoS ONE.