Chemical senses, including olfaction, pheromones, and taste, are crucial for the survival of most animals. There has long been a debate about whether different types of senses might influence each other. For instance, primates with a strong sense of vision are thought to have weakened olfactory abilities, although the oversimplified trade-off theory is now being questioned.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe house shrew (. species complex) colonized regions across southern Asia and the Indian Ocean following human activity. The house shrew is distributed on islands of the Ryukyu Archipelago, the southernmost part of Japan, but the evolutionary history of the shrew on those islands and possible associations between these populations and humans remain unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe house mouse (), which is commensal to humans, has spread globally via human activities, leading to secondary contact between genetically divergent subspecies. This pattern of genetic admixture can provide insights into the selective forces at play in this well-studied model organism. Our analysis of 163 house mouse genomes, with a particular focus on East Asia, revealed substantial admixture between the subspecies and , particularly in Japan and southern China.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Madagascar, the house mouse (Mus musculus) is widely believed to have colonized with human activities and is now one of the most abundant rodents on the island. However, its genetic background at the genomic level remains unclear, and clarifying this would help us to infer the timing of introduction and route of migration. In this study, we determined the whole-genome sequences of five Madagascar house mice captured from an inland location in Madagascar.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor more than 100 years, house mice (Mus musculus) have been used as a key animal model in biomedical research. House mice are genetically diverse, yet their genetic background at the global level has not been fully understood. Previous studies have suggested that they originated in South Asia and diverged into three major subspecies, almost simultaneously, approximately 110,000-500,000 years ago; however, they have spread across the world with the migration of modern humans in prehistoric and historic times (∼10,000 years ago to the present day) and have undergone secondary contact, which has complicated the genetic landscape of wild house mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile the house mouse (Mus musculus), widely distributed in Eurasia, is known to have substantial coat color variation between and within local populations, in both primary and secondary distribution areas, including the Japanese archipelago, the evolutionary history of the color variation is poorly understood. To address the ventral fur color variation, we quantified the lightness of museum skin specimens, and found that the southern subspecies, M. m.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Eurasian house mouse Mus musculus is useful for tracing prehistorical human movement related to the spread of farming. We determined whole mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences (ca. 16,000 bp) of 98 wild-derived individuals of two subspecies, M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF