Nucleotide variation in wild and inbred mice

The house mouse is a well-established model organism, particularly for studying the genetics of complex traits. However, most studies of mice use classical inbred strains, whose genomes derive from multiple species. Relatively little is known about the distribution of genetic variation among these species or how variation among strains relates to variation in the wild. We sequenced intronic regions of five X-linked loci in large samples of wild Mus domesticus and M. musculus, and we found low levels of nucleotide diversity in both species. We compared these data to published data from short portions of six X-linked and 18 autosomal loci in wild mice. We estimate that M. domesticus and M. musculus diverged