Mouse subspecies differentiation and H-2 polymorphism

Abstract

Four major groups of Mus musculus subspecies are analysed from the genetical view point. A number of genetic traits exhibited polymorphism. Most were common among domesticus, bactrianus and castaneus subspecies, while others were musculus subspecies‐specific. This suggests that the earliest differentiation was between domesticus and musculus. Mouse class I MHC was compared in these two lines. Immunological and molecular analyses of H‐2K molecules indicated that these two groups of mouse have several common haplotypes of class I molecules. Phenotype frequencies of these haplotypes are considerably different in each subspecies. “Overdominance selection” in class I H‐2 is one of the possible explanations for this.

Mosaic genealogy of the Mus musculus genome revealed by 21 nuclear genes from its three subspecies

“…Boissinot and Boursot (1997) suggested that selection has played a role in the rapid spread of Y-chromosome haplotypes across subspecies. This pattern of shared genetic variants across subspecies is also observed in several other loci such as in the class I MHC (Moriwaki et al, 1990) and in the p53 pseudogene (Ohtsuka et al, 1996), and is expected to be found in many other nuclear DNA genes. After the genome sequence of a laboratory inbred strain, C57BL/6J, was assembled (Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2002), there have been number of studies which indicated complex origin of the laboratory inbred strain (Wade et al, 2002;Frazer et al, 2004;Zhang et al, 2005).…”

“…There have been studies on chromosomal C-band patterns (Moriwaki et al, 1990), protein electrophoresis (Bonhomme et al, 1984;Boursot et al, 1989;Miyashita et al ,1985), and DNA RFLP (Ferris et al, 1983a(Ferris et al, , 1983bRedi et al, 1990;Suzuki et al, 1986;Yonekawa et al, 1981). Historically, because of the rather conservative morphology of mice, the definition of subspecies is largely based on the combinations of allele frequencies at many nuclear DNA loci (Bonhomme et al, 1984).…”

Further evidence for recombination between mouse hemoglobin beta b1 and b2 genes based on the nucleotide sequences of intron, UTR, and intergenic spacer regions

“…the d and w1 haplotypes is the most probable to explain the evidence derived from all structures of b1 and b2 genes and sequences within the intergenic spacer region among the three haplotypes. The proximity of the natural geographic distribution of the musculus and castaneus subspecies groups, representing the w1 and d hemoglobin haplotypes, respectively, and the close phylogenetic relationship between M. m. musculus and M. m. castaneus (Lundrigan et al, 2002), in the sense of genetically and biochemically circumscribed subspecies (Bonhomme et al, 1984;Moriwaki et al, 1986Moriwaki et al, , 1990, could be the evidence that would allow the recombination hypothesis to be justifiable. But it is unclear in this study how such a recombination could have occurred in the phylogeographical point of view.…”

Historical Foundations

“…Phylogenetically, the house mouse (Mus) belongs to the family Muridae, along with several other species of mice and the common rat ( Figure 1.2 Note the laboratory rat also is in the subfamily Murinae, which is why 'murine' is an inappropriate adjective for the laboratory mouse. Derived from Moriwaki and colleagues [114].…”