WhereWolf · The history of wolves, and their contribution to adaptation and phenotypic diversity in dogs
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-09-01 → 2018-08-31
- EU contribution
- €200,195
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The history of wolves, and their contribution to adaptation and phenotypic diversity in dogs
The gray wolf has been on the rebound in Europe and its re-emergence in northern Europe, including Denmark, demands that we better understand the species, to aid application of well informed conservation and management policies to these populations. In order to better understand the European wolves, we need to examine them in the context of wolves of the world, and further, other canids that they interact with. This action proposed to study the worldwide diversity of wolves, and examine their evolutionary relationships with related canids such as coyotes, red wolves, African golden wolves, golden jackals, Ethiopian wolves, dholes and African hunting dogs. The main objectives of the project can be summarized into 3 major parts - 1. finding out the relationship between wolves from different parts of the world and their relationships to other canids, 2. figuring out if gene flow or mixing between the different canids has played a major role in their evolution, and finally 3. using modern and ancient genomes to understand when and where modern dogs were domesticated. Understanding these relationships will allow us to implement appropriate and sensible conservation and management policies to the resurging wolf populations in Europe. As an outcome of this action, we have estimated the extent of gene flow among the different species of canids. Specifically, we find that gene flow is a major contributor to the evolutionary patterns that we see in these canids. This adds to an increasing body of evidence where gene flow is a common occurrence in natural populations, and is proposed to be a major driver of evolution. We find that multiple waves of mixing have affected the wolf population, both in Eurasia and North America. Finally, in possibly the most exciting finding, we hypothesise that the African golden wolf is a hybrid species, deriving ancestry from the Eurasian gray wolf and the Ethiopian wolf.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The resurgence of the gray wolf in Europe and its re-emergence in northern Europe, including Denmark, makes this an ideal time to study the wolf populations and their relationships to dogs. The evolutionary relationship between wolves and dogs is an area of active research. There are several key questions about dog domestication that remain unanswered, such as whether the dogs were domesticated once or several times, and the location of the domestication event(s). The ability to answer these questions has been hampered by multiple factors such as unavailability of a large number of wolf samples, the poor elucidation of the relationship between the wolf subspecies and the lack of an appropriate wolf reference genome. The resources available at the lab of Prof. Tom Gilbert at the Center for GeoGenetics in the University of Copenhagen will let me handle all these concerns effectively. As parts of several ongoing efforts, Prof. Gilbert has sequenced the genomes of a large number of wolves sampled from across the globe. Combining this resource with publicly available wolf and dog genome sequences and ancient canid genome sequences (currently being processed by the Gilbert lab in collaboration with Prof. Greger Larsen, University of Oxford), will allow me to address three aspects of canid evolutionary and population genetics: 1) the relationship between the different wolf subspecies, 2) the dog domestication event and its location and 3) the extent of fine scale local gene flow between dogs and wolves. Incorporation of the ancient samples along with the availability of a large number of sequenced canids will also let us answer questions about adaptive introgression from local wolves and will allow us to reconstruct the genome of the wolf that is ancestral to all dogs. The large-scale sampling and incorporation of ancient canids will shed new light on the evolutionary history of the canids. The findings of the project will be useful in the management of wolves in Europe.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union