a candidate subspecies discrimination system involving a vomeronasal receptor gene with different alleles fixed in m. m. domesticus and m. m. musculus候选人亚种歧视犁鼻骨系统涉及受体基因与不同的等位基因固定在m . m .家和m . m .所支配.pdfVIP

A Candidate Subspecies Discrimination System Involving a Vomeronasal Receptor Gene with Different Alleles Fixed in M. m. domesticus and M. m. musculus 1 2 1 Robert C. Karn *, Janet M. Young , Christina M. Laukaitis 1 Department of Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, 2 Division of Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, United States of America Abstract Assortative mating, a potentially efficient prezygotic reproductive barrier, may prevent loss of genetic potential by avoiding the production of unfit hybrids (i.e., because of hybrid infertility or hybrid breakdown) that occur at regions of secondary contact between incipient species. In the case of the mouse hybrid zone, where two subspecies of Mus musculus (M. m. domesticus and M. m. musculus) meet and exchange genes to a limited extent, assortative mating requires a means of subspecies recognition. We based the work reported here on the hypothesis that, if there is a pheromone sufficiently diverged between M. m. domesticus and M. m. musculus to mediate subspecies recognition, then that process must also require a specific receptor(s), also sufficiently diverged between the subspecies, to receive the signal and elicit an assortative mating response. We studied the mouse V1R genes, which encode a large family of receptors in the vomeronasal organ (VNO), by screening Perlegen SNP data and identified one, Vmn1r67, with 24 fixed SNP differences most of which (15/24) are nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions between M. m. domesticus and M. m. musculus. We observed substantial linkage disequilibrium (LD) between Vmn1r67 and Abpa27, a mouse salivary androgen-binding protein gene that encodes a protei