Mate choice in Mus musculus is relative and dependent on the estrous state.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Zinck L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3677927 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:House mice (Mus musculus) emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which are surprisingly complex and have features of bird song, but their functions are not well understood. Previous studies have reported mixed evidence on whether there are sex differences in USV emission, though vocalization rate or other features may depend upon whether potential receivers are of the same or opposite sex. We recorded the USVs of wild-derived adult house mice (F1 of wild-caught Mus musculus musculus), and we compared the vocalizations of males and females in response to a stimulus mouse of the same- or opposite-sex. To detect and quantify vocalizations, we used an algorithm that automatically detects USVs (Automatic Mouse Ultrasound Detector or A-MUD). We found high individual variation in USV emission rates (4 to 2083 elements/10 min trial) and a skewed distribution, with most mice (60%) emitting few (?50) elements. We found no differences in the rates of calling between the sexes overall, but mice of both sexes emitted vocalizations at a higher rate and higher frequencies during opposite- compared to same-sex interactions. We also observed a trend toward higher amplitudes by males when presented with a male compared to a female stimulus. Our results suggest that mice modulate the rate and frequency of vocalizations depending upon the sex of potential receivers.
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Project description:Wild populations of the house mouse (Mus musculus) represent the raw genetic material for the classical inbred strains in biomedical research and are a major model system for evolutionary biology. We provide whole genome sequencing data of individuals representing natural populations of M. m. domesticus (24 individuals from 3 populations), M. m. helgolandicus (3 individuals), M. m. musculus (22 individuals from 3 populations) and M. spretus (8 individuals from one population). We use a single pipeline to map and call variants for these individuals and also include 10 additional individuals of M. m. castaneus for which genomic data are publically available. In addition, RNAseq data were obtained from 10 tissues of up to eight adult individuals from each of the three M. m. domesticus populations for which genomic data were collected. Data and analyses are presented via tracks viewable in the UCSC or IGV genome browsers. We also provide information on available outbred stocks and instructions on how to keep them in the laboratory.
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Project description:Abstract: Background:Communal nursing in house mice is an example of cooperation where females pool litters in the same nest and indiscriminately nurse own and other offspring despite potential exploitation. The direct fitness benefits associated with communal nursing shown in laboratory studies suggest it to be a selected component of female house mice reproductive behaviour. However, past studies on communal nursing in free-living populations have debated whether it is a consequence of sharing the same nest or an active choice. Here using data from a long-term study of free-living, wild house mice we investigated individual nursing decisions and determined what factors influenced a female's decision to nurse communally. Results:Females chose to nurse solitarily more often than expected by chance, but the likelihood of nursing solitarily decreased when females had more partners available. While finding no influence of pairwise relatedness on partner choice, we observed that females shared their social environment with genetically similar individuals, suggesting a female's home area consisted of related females, possibly facilitating the evolution of cooperation. Within such a home area females were more likely to nest communally when the general relatedness of her available options was relatively high. Females formed communal nests with females that were familiar through previous associations and had young pups of usually less than 5 days old. Conclusions:Our findings suggest that communal nursing was not a by-product of sharing the same nesting sites, but females choose communal nursing partners from a group of genetically similar females, and ultimately the decision may then depend on the pool of options available. Social partner choice proved to be an integrated part of cooperation among females, and might allow females to reduce the conflict over number of offspring in a communal nest and milk investment towards own and other offspring. We suggest that social partner choice may be a general mechanism to stabilize costly cooperation.
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Project description:The immune state of wild animals is largely unknown. Knowing this and what affects it is important in understanding how infection and disease affects wild animals. The immune state of wild animals is also important in understanding the biology of their pathogens, which is directly relevant to explaining pathogen spillover among species, including to humans. The paucity of knowledge about wild animals' immune state is in stark contrast to our exquisitely detailed understanding of the immunobiology of laboratory animals. Making an immune response is costly, and many factors (such as age, sex, infection status, and body condition) have individually been shown to constrain or promote immune responses. But, whether or not these factors affect immune responses and immune state in wild animals, their relative importance, and how they interact (or do not) are unknown. Here, we have investigated the immune ecology of wild house mice-the same species as the laboratory mouse-as an example of a wild mammal, characterising their adaptive humoral, adaptive cellular, and innate immune state. Firstly, we show how immune variation is structured among mouse populations, finding that there can be extensive immune discordance among neighbouring populations. Secondly, we identify the principal factors that underlie the immunological differences among mice, showing that body condition promotes and age constrains individuals' immune state, while factors such as microparasite infection and season are comparatively unimportant. By applying a multifactorial analysis to an immune system-wide analysis, our results bring a new and unified understanding of the immunobiology of a wild mammal.
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Project description:Introgressed variants from other species can be an important source of genetic variation because they may arise rapidly, can include multiple mutations on a single haplotype, and have often been pretested by selection in the species of origin. Although introgressed alleles are generally deleterious, several studies have reported introgression as the source of adaptive alleles-including the rodenticide-resistant variant of Vkorc1 that introgressed from Mus spretus into European populations of Mus musculus domesticus. Here, we conducted bidirectional genome scans to characterize introgressed regions into one wild population of M. spretus from Spain and three wild populations of M. m. domesticus from France, Germany, and Iran. Despite the fact that these species show considerable intrinsic postzygotic reproductive isolation, introgression was observed in all individuals, including in the M. musculus reference genome (GRCm38). Mus spretus individuals had a greater proportion of introgression compared with M. m. domesticus, and within M. m. domesticus, the proportion of introgression decreased with geographic distance from the area of sympatry. Introgression was observed on all autosomes for both species, but not on the X-chromosome in M. m. domesticus, consistent with known X-linked hybrid sterility and inviability genes that have been mapped to the M. spretus X-chromosome. Tract lengths were generally short with a few outliers of up to 2.7 Mb. Interestingly, the longest introgressed tracts were in olfactory receptor regions, and introgressed tracts were significantly enriched for olfactory receptor genes in both species, suggesting that introgression may be a source of functional novelty even between species with high barriers to gene flow.
| S-EPMC8784167 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The ability, propensity and need to mount an immune response vary both among individuals and within a single individual over time.A wide array of parameters has been found to influence immune state in carefully controlled experiments, but we understand much less about which of these parameters are important in determining immune state in wild populations.Diet can influence immune responses, for example when nutrient availability is limited. We therefore predict that natural dietary variation will play a role in modulating immune state, but this has never been tested.We measured carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios in an island population of house mice Mus musculus domesticus as an indication of dietary variation, and the expression of a range of immune-related genes to represent immune state.After accounting for potential confounding influences such as age, sex and helminth load, we found a significant association between carbon isotope ratio and levels of immune activity in the mesenteric lymph nodes, particularly in relation to the inflammatory response.This association demonstrates the important interplay between diet and an animal's response to immune challenges, and therefore potentially its susceptibility to disease. A plain language summary is available for this article.
| S-EPMC6767599 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Our understanding of the mammalian cell cycle is due in large part to the analysis of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 2 and CDK4/6. These kinases are regulated by E and D type cyclins, respectively, and coordinate the G(1)/S-phase transition. In contrast, little is known about CDK3, a homolog of CDK2 and cell division cycle kinase 2 (CDC2). Previous studies using ectopic expression of human CDK3 suggest a role for this kinase in the G(1)/S-phase transition, but analysis of the endogenous kinase has been stymied by the low levels of protein present in cells and by the absence of an identifiable cyclin partner. Herein we report the presence of a single point mutation in the CDK3 gene from several Mus musculus strains commonly used in the laboratory. This mutation results in the replacement of a conserved tryptophan (Trp-187) within kinase consensus domain IX with a stop codon. The protein predicted to be encoded by this allele is truncated near the T loop, which is involved in activation by CDK-activating kinase. This mutation also deletes motif XI known to be required for kinase function and is, therefore, expected to generate a null allele. In stark contrast, CDK3 from two wild-mice species (Mus spretus and Mus mus castaneus) lack this mutation. These data indicate that CDK3 is not required for M. musculus development and suggest that any functional role played by CDK3 in the G(1)/S-phase transition is likely to be redundant with another CDK.
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Project description:BACKGROUND: Long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons make up a large fraction of the typical mammalian genome. They comprise about 8% of the human genome and approximately 10% of the mouse genome. On account of their abundance, LTR retrotransposons are believed to hold major significance for genome structure and function. Recent advances in genome sequencing of a variety of model organisms has provided an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate better the diversity of LTR retrotransposons resident in eukaryotic genomes. RESULTS: Using a new data-mining program, LTR_STRUC, in conjunction with conventional techniques, we have mined the GenBank mouse (Mus musculus) database and the more complete Ensembl mouse dataset for LTR retrotransposons. We report here that the M. musculus genome contains at least 21 separate families of LTR retrotransposons; 13 of these families are described here for the first time. CONCLUSIONS: All families of mouse LTR retrotransposons are members of the gypsy-like superfamily of retroviral-like elements. Several different families of unrelated non-autonomous elements were identified, suggesting that the evolution of non-autonomy may be a common event. High sequence similarity between several LTR retrotransposons identified in this study and those found in distantly-related species suggests that horizontal transfer has been a significant factor in the evolution of mouse LTR retrotransposons.
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Project description:Copy number variation is an important dimension of genetic diversity and has implications in development and disease. As an important model organism, the mouse is a prime candidate for copy number variant (CNV) characterization, but this has yet to be completed for a large sample size. Here we report CNV analysis of publicly available, high-density microarray data files for 351 mouse tail samples, including 290 mice that had not been characterized for CNVs previously.We found 9634 putative autosomal CNVs across the samples affecting 6.87% of the mouse reference genome. We find significant differences in the degree of CNV uniqueness (single sample occurrence) and the nature of CNV-gene overlap between wild-caught mice and classical laboratory strains. CNV-gene overlap was associated with lipid metabolism, pheromone response and olfaction compared to immunity, carbohydrate metabolism and amino-acid metabolism for wild-caught mice and classical laboratory strains, respectively. Using two subspecies of wild-caught Mus musculus, we identified putative CNVs unique to those subspecies and show this diversity is better captured by wild-derived laboratory strains than by the classical laboratory strains. A total of 9 genic copy number variable regions (CNVRs) were selected for experimental confirmation by droplet digital PCR (ddPCR).The analysis we present is a comprehensive, genome-wide analysis of CNVs in Mus musculus, which increases the number of known variants in the species and will accelerate the identification of novel variants in future studies.
| S-EPMC4490682 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The mammalian vomeronasal organ (VNO) expresses two G-protein coupled receptor gene families that mediate pheromone responses, the V1R and V2R receptor genes. In rodents, there are ~150 V1R genes comprising 12 subfamilies organized in gene clusters at multiple chromosomal locations. Previously, we showed that several of these subfamilies had been extensively modulated by gene duplications, deletions, and gene conversions around the time of the evolutionary split of the mouse and rat lineages, consistent with the hypothesis that V1R repertoires might be involved in reinforcing speciation events. Here, we generated genome sequence for one large cluster containing two V1R subfamilies in Mus spretus, a closely related and sympatric species to Mus musculus, and investigated evolutionary change in these repertoires along the two mouse lineages.We describe a comparison of spretus and musculus with respect to genome organization and synteny, as well as V1R gene content and phylogeny, with reference to previous observations made between mouse and rat. Unlike the mouse-rat comparisons, synteny seems to be largely conserved between the two mouse species. Disruption of local synteny is generally associated with differences in repeat content, although these differences appear to arise more from deletion than new integrations. Even though unambiguous V1R orthology is evident, we observe dynamic modulation of the functional repertoires, with two of seven V1Rb and one of eleven V1Ra genes lost in spretus, two V1Ra genes becoming pseudogenes in musculus, two additional orthologous pairs apparently subject to strong adaptive selection, and another divergent orthologous pair that apparently was subjected to gene conversion.Therefore, eight of the 18 (~44%) presumptive V1Ra/V1Rb genes in the musculus-spretus ancestor appear to have undergone functional modulation since these two species diverged. As compared to the rat-mouse split, where modulation is evident by independent expansions of these two V1R subfamilies, divergence between musculus and spretus has arisen more by mutations within coding sequences. These results support the hypothesis that adaptive changes in functional V1R repertoires contribute to the delineation of very closely related species.
| S-EPMC2644715 | biostudies-literature