Full success at #eseb2025! Almost non-stop flow of researchers coming to the poster, with insightful and intriguing comments and questions about our work on European wolf demography at #UAB-IBB. Honored to have been part of this.

Let's talk about an (ongoing) research on European wolves. How will climate change affect them? How can we reduce the human impact on them? The best way to see this is looking at their (demographic) history. Come by P02.083 today between 17.00-19.00 to talk! #ESEB2025

Does this trait affect IBGW behavior? While most European wolf pops recolonize lost territories, IBGW do not disperse. Italian wolves crossed the Pyrenees, but IBGW have never crossed north.

Could CDH13 be the key? More research is needed!

Img: Quevedo et al. 2019 Biodiv Cons

CDH13, or cadherin 13, is associated with delayed response in dogs, or "inhibitory control" (Gnanadesikan et al 2020 Int Comp Biol; Bray et al. 2014 Anim Cogn). Interestingly, this trait makes dogs take more time to make decisions.

(Image: shutterstock)

What do those genes? Responses to DNA damage (DAPP1, NSMCE4A,MPPED2), lipid homeostasis and lysosomal function (MBTPS1), melanin production (MBTPS1), cell adhesion in neural tissues
(PCDH9) and neural differentiation (CDH13).

But CDH13 was the most intriguing one.

Voilà! Dog introgression well distributed across the genome. We applied two cross-population selection statistics to detect selected genes in IBGW (but not in NEGW).

6 genes with high dog introgression and under selection found: DAPP1, NSMCE4A, MPPED2, PCDH9, MBTPS1 and CDH13.

We used a mathematical method used in Latin American populations (Norris et al. 2018 BMC Genomics) to investigate dog ancestry enrichment in IBGW, applying a chi-square test for statistical significance and a FDR correction. Equations below extracted from Norris et al. 2018:

We investigated time since admixture with a novel LD- and LAI-based method to detect two pulse models of admixture, LaNeta (github.com/hse-cs/LaNeta).

Surprise, surprise: 1st admixture pulse (T1) was 10.2kyr ago (95%CI: +/-6.9kyr), with 4.5% admixture rate. T2 was recent and only 0.5%.

To be noticed: HUGE differences btw methods. Loter largely overestimating introgression proportion. RFMix highly dependent on block size and number of generations since admixture.

But: ELAI shows consistent results at 13, 100 and 1000 gen ago. Also Recomb-Mix (new LAI method). Interesting.

But the interesting thing happens when we apply LAI! We compare several techniques (Loter, RFMix, ELAI and Recomb-Mix) and find an average 4.9% introgression from dogs in IBGW!

When did this happen?

Key findings:
1. IBGW form a well defined cluster separate from dogs and northern European gray wolves (NEGW). Literature shows a 30kyr-old separation between NEGW and IBGW, as old as wolf-dog (Bergström et al. 2022 Nature)
2. Admixture analyses show low introgression: 0.5%