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Our new study about lack of dog introgression in Fennoscandian wolf populations is out in @EvolAppJournal! Photo by co-author Ilpo Kojola.
Thanks to all co-authors!! See main findings below
Thanks to all co-authors!! See main findings below
By looking at WGS data from >200 Scandinavian, Finnish and Russian Karelian wolves, >100 dogs and 3 known wolf-dog hybrids, we show that there are no genomewide traces of dog ancestry in our wolves. Scandinavian wolves are well separated from Finnish/Russian wolves in a PCA...
...which seems to be caused by drift and the high level of inbreeding in the Scandinavian population. Keeping only the founder/f.offspring, they cluster with Finnish/RussianKarelian wolves, pointing to the origin of the Scandianvian pop.
An attempt to look for local ancestry along the chromosomes, first using the hybrids, showed that statistical phasing is highly problematic! (The mosaic appearance of the 50/50 hybrid below are caused by switch errors from the phasing). Overall, our wolves had less than 1% dog...
..ancestry, which was similar to the level of wolf ancestry in many dogs (including breed dogs). The levels did not vary over time, and regions were largely consistent between Scandinavian, Finnish and Russian Karelian wolves, suggesting and older origin or even tech.issues.
Finally, we also showed that local ancestry methods relying on "ancestral populations", are highly dependent on the number of samples and the number of markers used. With only a few "ancestral individuals", the dog ancestry levels in wolves increased substantially.
Read more here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eva.13151?af=R
