And with the great collaboration of @bvon.bsky.social !

This work is a collaboration between Princeton University, the University of Potsdam and EBD-CSIC. I am extremely grateful to @sramach.bsky.social, who allowed me to finish this paper during a postdoc at her lab.

Coauthorship: me and @isalado.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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:

So, to recap:
1. Recent admixture pulse, 0.5%
2. Ancient (10kyr) admixture pulse and maintained until now of ca. 4.5% dog admixture.

Why was it conserved for so long? What genes were enriched in dog ancestry? Were there genes under selection?