The foxes found dog genes “friendship.”
It turns out that foxes become aggressive due to a mutation in the genome, which in humans causes mental retardation.
Scientists from the Institute of Cytology and genetics SB RAS jointly with researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently published a decrypted data on the genome of the red Fox. Scientists have identified in the sections that changed the view of Lis during the process of domestication by man. According to the researchers, previously, they could only compare the specific genes that contains a Fox with the same in modern dogs. However, a more accurate study of genes has shown that foxes have a gene that is associated with the expression of friendliness and love for people.
Scientists were able to collect a complete picture of the genome of the red Fox due to the modern method of reading the nucleotides in DNA and RNA. For a recent study donors were foxes living at the Institute in Akademgorodok. It is worth noting that about 60 years ago, the scientist Dmitry Belyaev was to choose from foxes, which are bred on fur farms for their fur, the most friendly individuals. In parallel, the scientist deduced foxes, which have a strong aggression. Now modern methods of studying of DNA has allowed scientists to gather a set of genes of the dog and a comparison with the genes of “good” foxes Belyaev. Thanks to foreign researchers was decoded 10 aggressive and 10 the obedient DNA collected from foxes.
It turns out that the genes of good and evil foxes differ in the sequence of nucleotides in the 103 precinct. The genes of dogs differ from the wolf genes in the same areas that the Fox genes. According to scientists, Novosibirsk foxes have also changed due to the chromosome rearrangement that in humans causes Williams syndrome. However, contrary to expectation, the violation was only observed in the most evil foxes. Most likely, a major role in the domestication of foxes played the SorCS1 gene that our scientists. It is in the DNA of animals like this, which is not observed in other members of the species. It is the genome of “friendship.”
The discovery will help to understand the mechanism of domestication. In the future people will be able to do many of these wild animals Pets.
