سلالات كلاب أمريكيه الأصل من عصور ما قبل كولومبوس
وجد الباحثون التأثير الأوروبي محدود على سلالات الكلاب أمريكيه الأصل
والجدير بالذكر انهم كانو يستخدمون هذه الكلب
الأصلع للصيد وأحيانا كحيوان أليف
المقال بالكامل بلغه المصدر
Jane J. Lee
National Geographic
Published July 9, 2013
The tangle of questions regarding the ancestry of dog breeds
indigenous to the Americas
is slowly unraveling.
Unlike the poodles that populate many a household, native
American dog breed lineages originated from East Asian canines, with little
genetic influence from European breeds—formerly an open question, according to
a new study.
Native breeds include the Canadian Eskimo dog, the Inuit
sled dog, the Greenland dog, the Chihuahua, the Xoloitzcuintli (Mexican
hairless dog), and the Peruvian Perro Sín Pelo (Peruvian hairless dog).
It was already known that many dog breeds are descended from
canines living in the Americas
during pre-Columbian times—or the period before European colonization and
influence.
When humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of
land connecting Alaska and Russia, about 15,000
to 10,000 years ago, they brought their dogs with them.
"Dogs have been here pretty much since humans have been
here," said Adam Boyko, an evolutionary geneticist at Cornell University
in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved in the study.
But a mystery remained as to how much original, pre-Columbian
genetic stock remained in these native populations, said Peter Savolainen, an
evolutionary geneticist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and a co-author
of the study. (Read about how to build a dog in National Geographic magazine.)
Ancient Signal
"The breeds that we are looking at are almost totally
pure," said Savolainen. The most exciting result, he said, is the genetic
link between a modern Chihuahua
sequence and an ancient one.
"We have a straight line back in time," he said. The
modern Chihuahua is most definitely descended
from pre-Columbian canines living in Mexico.
Savolainen and colleagues also looked at "free-ranging"
or stray dog populations, including a group of canines in the southeastern U.S. called Carolina dogs.
When Savolainen and colleagues started this study, the
evolutionary geneticist expected that any native DNA signals in stray dog
populations would have been completely replaced by sequences from European dogs
like German shepherds or poodles.
But it turns out that certain rural populations of these
strays in Mexico, Bolivia, and the U.S. retain a small stamp of their
ancient origins, the researchers report in a study published July 9 in the
journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Savolainen said, "What surprised me the most were the Carolina dogs," which
look like dingoes or Asian village dogs. A previous researcher suggested the Carolina dog might be indigenous to America, but
most people didn't believe him.
But the team's genetic analysis found that Carolina dogs share a unique genetic marker
called A184 that hasn't been reported before. And A184 belongs to a group of
genetic markers specific to East Asian canines.
Complications
The researchers were able to conduct this comparison between
American, European, and East Asian dogs thanks to a large data set of
mitochondrial DNA sequenced from thousands of dogs. They were also able to
compare their modern sequences with 19 ancient dog genomes taken from remains
found in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico,
and Alaska.
Mitochondrial DNA comes from structures in cells called
mitochondria, which function like battery packs, supplying energy for the cell's
activities. They are inherited only from an organism's mother.
It's easier to compare genomes between individuals using
mitochondrial DNA than using DNA from a cell's nucleus, explained Boyko, a
National Geographic grantee.
Nuclear DNA comes from both the mother and the father, and
the copies can swap pieces with each other in a process called recombination. This
makes for an amazing variety of looks in the offspring, but creates enormous
headaches for scientists trying to track down a population's origins.
"It gets complicated really quickly," Boyko said.
Buildup
The sheer scope of the canine genetic analysis is impressive,
he said. Not only did the team look at breeds from the Old and New World, but
they also looked at stray dogs in the Americas.
One hitch is the fact that the researchers were limited in
the number of genetic markers they examined, Boyko said. The authors
acknowledged as much in the paper, he added, and it shouldn't take anything
away from the study.
Indeed, co-author Savolainen said he plans on looking at
nuclear DNA in these dog populations to get a sense of how big the founding
population might have been, and to pin down when their canine ancestors came
over from East Asia.
The problem is that you need big data sets for the kinds of
comparisons he wants to make, and there aren't many nuclear DNA data sets for
dogs just lying around.
Researchers are working on building them, he said. "[But]
I think it will be a couple of years before you can try this specifically on
American dogs."