In many ways, dogs are an ideal model for the study of genetic erosion and population recovery, problems of major concern in the field of conservation genetics. Genetic diversity in many dog breeds has been declining systematically since the beginning of the 1800s, when modern breeding practices came into fashion. As such, inbreeding in domestic dog breeds is substantial and widespread and has led to an increase in recessive deleterious mutations of high effect as well as general inbreeding depression. Pedigrees can in theory be used to guide breeding decisions, though are often incomplete and do not reflect the full history of inbreeding. Small microsatellite panels are also used in some cases to choose mating pairs to produce litters with low levels of inbreeding. However, the long‐term impact of such practices has not been thoroughly evaluated. Here, we use forward simulation on a model of the dog genome to examine the impact of using limited marker panels to guide pairwise mating decisions on genome‐wide population‐level genetic diversity. Our results suggest that in unmanaged populations, where breeding decisions are made at the pairwise—rather than population‐level, such panels can lead to accelerated loss of genetic diversity at genome regions unlinked to panel markers, compared to random mating. These results demonstrate the importance of genome‐wide genetic panels for managing and conserving genetic diversity in dogs and other companion animals.

中文翻译：

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检查小型遗传组合在伴侣动物种群基因组保护中的功效


在许多方面，狗是研究遗传侵蚀和种群恢复的理想模型，这些问题是保护遗传学领域主要关注的问题。自 1800 年代初现代育种方法开始流行以来，许多犬种的遗传多样性一直在系统性下降。因此，家养犬种的近交现象大量且普遍，并导致高效隐性有害突变以及普遍近交衰退的增加。理论上，谱系可以用来指导育种决策，尽管谱系通常是不完整的，并且不能反映近亲繁殖的完整历史。在某些情况下，小型微卫星面板也用于选择交配对，以产生低水平近交的幼崽。然而，此类做法的长期影响尚未得到彻底评估。在这里，我们对狗基因组模型进行正向模拟，以检查使用有限的标记组来指导成对交配决策对全基因组群体水平遗传多样性的影响。我们的结果表明，在不受管理的群体中，育种决策是在成对而非群体水平上做出的，与随机交配相比，此类组合可能会导致与组合标记无关的基因组区域的遗传多样性加速丧失。这些结果证明了全基因组遗传面板对于管理和保护狗和其他伴侣动物遗传多样性的重要性。