1. Out of Southern East Asia of the Brown Rat Revealed by Large-Scale Genome Sequencing.
- Author
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Zeng L, Ming C, Li Y, Su LY, Su YH, Otecko NO, Dalecky A, Donnellan S, Aplin K, Liu XH, Song Y, Zhang ZB, Esmailizadeh A, Sohrabi SS, Nanaei HA, Liu HQ, Wang MS, Ag Atteynine S, Rocamora G, Brescia F, Morand S, Irwin DM, Peng MS, Yao YG, Li HP, Wu DD, and Zhang YP
- Subjects
- Africa, Animals, Asia, Southeastern epidemiology, Biological Evolution, Europe, Evolution, Molecular, Genetic Variation genetics, Genetics, Population, Genome genetics, Middle East, Phylogeny, Whole Genome Sequencing methods, Phylogeography methods, Rats genetics
- Abstract
The geographic origin and migration of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) remain subjects of considerable debate. In this study, we sequenced whole genomes of 110 wild brown rats with a diverse world-wide representation. We reveal that brown rats migrated out of southern East Asia, rather than northern Asia as formerly suggested, into the Middle East and then to Europe and Africa, thousands of years ago. Comparison of genomes from different geographical populations reveals that many genes involved in the immune system experienced positive selection in the wild brown rat., (© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)
- Published
- 2018
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