The results of the comparative study of the genome of brown house mice and sister species in China, large foot mice.

On May 8, the international journal Molecular Biology and Evolution published online that Zhang Jianxu Of the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with sun Zhongsheng and Zhao Fangqing of the Beijing Institute of Life Sciences, worked with two research groups to study brown rats and sister species in China. The results of a genome comparison study of rats (Teng Huajing/Zhang Weihua/Shi Chengmin, etc., Population genomics reveals speciation and introgression between Brown Norway rats and their siblings).
brown house mouse belongs to the house animal species, the ecological adaptability is very strong, the distribution is almost all over the world, is the most successful invasive mammal on earth.
laboratory rats from which they were domesticated became the first experimental animals and have been widely used in life science research.
northeast china and Mongolia are considered to be important origins of brown house mice.
Zhang Jianxu/Zhang Weihua, in collaboration with British scientist Peter Keightley, found that the genetic diversity of the brown house mouse population in northeast China is very low, only one-fifth of the mouse population, about 20,000 years ago there was a population bottleneck (2012 G3.2:1661-1664; 2015 Mol.Biol.Evol.32, 2547-2558).
compared with mice, brown house mice have far fewer studies of field biology, and little is known about the timing of their emergence as an independent species and the genomic characteristics that can quickly adapt to the environment.
In view of the rich genetic diversity of brown house mouse resources in China, the researchers further used comparative genomics to sequence and compare the whole genome of several brown house mouse populations and their sister large foot mice populations in China, and found that the nucleotide diversity of broad brown house mice was more narrow than that of narrow. The low population size of large foot mice and the effective population size of brown house mice fluctuated greatly with history, there was a genetic bottleneck in the last ice age, and the differentiation time of the two sister species coincided with the time of the largest glacier in East Asia.
They also found that interbreeding still occurred between the two sister species after differentiation, and that some of the genomic intervals preserved through intersexual communication related to chemical communication, as well as those associated with food metabolism, immune response, alertness, and anxiety that were selectively removed from the genomes of brown house mice, may have played an important role in the ecological adaptation of brown house mice.
This study sheds light on the breeding time of brown house mouse species, reveals the historical changes of the population and interbreeding between the differentiated brown house mouse and its sister species, provides an important example of species adaptation differentiation, and provides important evidence to reveal the molecular basis of the broad ecological adaptation of brown house mouse.
Huajing, assistant researcher Zhang Weihua and Shi Chengmin are co-authors of the study, which has been funded by projects such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Strategic Pilot Science and Technology Project and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
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