Forstmeier Wolfgang, Segelbacher Gernot, Mueller Jakob C, Kempenaers Bart
Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Postfach 1564, D-82305 Starnberg (Seewiesen), Germany.
Mol Ecol. 2007 Oct;16(19):4039-50. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03444.x.
The zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) is a small Australian grassland songbird that has been domesticated over the past two centuries. Because it is easy to breed in captivity, it has become a widely used study organism, especially in behavioural research. Most work has been conducted on domesticated populations maintained at numerous laboratories in Europe and North America. However, little is known about the extent to which, during the process of domestication, captive populations have gone through bottlenecks in population size, leading to inbred and potentially genetically differentiated study populations. This is an important issue, because (i) behavioural studies on captive populations might suffer from artefacts arising from high levels of inbreeding or lack of genetic variation in such populations, and (ii) it may hamper the comparability of research findings. To address this issue, we genotyped 1000 zebra finches from 18 captive and two wild populations at 10 highly variable microsatellite loci. We found that all captive populations have lost some of the genetic variability present in the wild, but there is no evidence that they have gone through a severe bottleneck, as the average captive population still showed a mean of 11.7 alleles per locus, compared to a mean of 19.3 alleles/locus for wild zebra finches. We found significant differentiation between the captive populations (F(ST) = 0.062). Patterns of genetic similarity closely match geographical relationships, so the most pronounced differences occur between the three continents: Australia, North America, and Europe. By providing a tree of the genetic similarity of the different captive populations, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of variation in research findings obtained by different laboratories.
斑胸草雀（Taeniopygia guttata）是一种小型的澳大利亚草原鸣禽，在过去两个世纪中已被驯化。由于它易于在圈养条件下繁殖，已成为一种广泛使用的研究生物，尤其是在行为研究方面。大多数研究工作是在欧洲和北美的众多实验室饲养的驯化种群上进行的。然而，对于驯化过程中圈养种群在种群数量上经历瓶颈的程度，从而导致近亲繁殖和潜在的遗传分化研究种群，我们知之甚少。这是一个重要问题，因为（i）对圈养种群的行为研究可能会受到此类种群高度近亲繁殖或缺乏遗传变异所产生的假象的影响，并且（ii）这可能会妨碍研究结果的可比性。为了解决这个问题，我们对来自18个圈养种群和2个野生种群的1000只斑胸草雀在10个高度可变微卫星位点进行了基因分型。我们发现所有圈养种群都失去了一些野生种群中存在的遗传变异性，但没有证据表明它们经历了严重的瓶颈，因为圈养种群的平均每个位点仍显示有11.7个等位基因，而野生斑胸草雀平均每个位点有19.3个等位基因。我们发现圈养种群之间存在显著分化（F(ST)=0.062）。遗传相似模式与地理关系密切匹配，所以最明显的差异出现在三大洲：澳大利亚、北美和欧洲之间。通过提供不同圈养种群的遗传相似性树状图，我们希望有助于更好地理解不同实验室获得的研究结果的差异。
