Monday, December 31, 2018

12 Headlines About Inbreeding


Grauer's Gorilla's webbed feet linked to inbreeding.
A rare gorilla population has fertility and deformity problems due to inbreeding.

Scientists solve inbreeding barrier to more nutritious hay.
Alfalfa genes contain a self‑defense mechanism that prevents inbreeding, stopping breeders from developing inbred lines — an important step in breeding hybrids with favorable traits, such as more nutritious, high‑yielding hay.

Game of Clones: 'Incest math' shows epic inbreeding between Jon Snow and Daenerys
Daenerys and Jon Snow are aunt and nephew sharing 44 to 47.45 percent of their DNA.

Outbred mice are fine for most animal studies.
Inbred mice are as variable as cross bred mice, a finding that may put a kink in the pure-bred laboratory mouse business.

Frequent inbreeding may have caused skeletal abnormalities in early humans.
One reason for so much deformity in early many hunter-gatherer groups may have been due to inbreeding.

Bumble bee decline likely due to inbreeding.
The decline in the yellow-banded bumblebee may be due to inbreeding leading to more disease.

How profit-driven inbreeding could bring dairy to its knees.
Modern "industrial" breeds of dairy cows are particularly vulnerable to new bacterial or viral infections because they have very little genetic diversity compared with local breeds. Millions of Holstein cows, for example, originate from a mere handful of bulls.

The positives and negatives of inbreeding in Thoroughbreds.
Standarized horse racing conditions have resulted in more specialization in horses, leading to more inbreeding, and more health problems.

Vancouver Island marmots survived extinction but inbreeding still stalks them.
A captive breeding program at the Calgary Zoo has boosted the number of Vancouver Island marmots from a critical low of 30 in 2003 to more than 250 today, 200 of which have been reintroduced in the wild.

Wolves in Scandinavia are seriously inbred.
The isolated population of 430 wolves in Scandinavia is highly inbred, descended from a handful of animals that arrived in the region in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lion inbreeding at London Zoo causing high levels of cub deaths.
The Asian lions at the London zoo are descended from nine “founders” brought to Europe from India in the 1990s. 39 of 57 lion cubs born between 2007 and 2009 died within four months of birth.

How plants prevent inbreeding.
Self-fertilization is a problem, as it leads to inbreeding. Recognition systems that prevent self-fertilization have evolved to ensure that a plant mates only with a genetically different plant and not with itself.

2 comments:

Ed Baptist said...

The Habsburgs were awhile ago, but not that early. https://allthatsinteresting.com/habsburg-jaw

Jennifer said...

Botany perspective : there are many mechanisms that prevent self- pollination in plants, but there are also MANY plants that self pollinate (grapes are a familiar example). There are also many many plants that reproduce apomictically, that is, cloning without sex (eg, most of the edible berries).