Abstract
The Czechoslovakian Wolfdog is a unique dog breed that originated from hybridization between German Shepherds and wild Carpathian wolves in the 1950s as a military experiment. This breed was used for guarding the Czechoslovakian borders during the cold war and is currently kept by civilian breeders all round the world. The aim of our study was to characterize, for the first time, the genetic composition of this breed in relation to its known source populations. We sequenced the hypervariable part of the mtDNA control region and genotyped the Amelogenin gene, four sex-linked microsatellites and 39 autosomal microsatellites in 79 Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs, 20 German Shepherds and 28 Carpathian wolves. We performed a range of population genetic analyses based on both empirical and simulated data. Only two mtDNA and two Y-linked haplotypes were found in Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs. Both mtDNA haplotypes were of domestic origin, while only one of the Y-haplotypes was shared with German Shepherds and the other was unique to Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs. The observed inbreeding coefficient was low despite the small effective population size of the breed, possibly due to heterozygote advantages determined by introgression of wolf alleles. Moreover, Czechoslovakian Wolfdog genotypes were distinct from both parental populations, indicating the role of founder effect, drift and/or genetic hitchhiking. The results revealed the peculiar genetic composition of the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog, showing a limited introgression of wolf alleles within a higher proportion of the dog genome, consistent with the reiterated backcrossing used in the pedigree. Artificial selection aiming to keep wolf-like phenotypes but dog-like behavior resulted in a distinctive genetic composition of Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs, which provides a unique example to study the interactions between dog and wolf genomes.
Highlights
Recent genomic studies indicate that dogs were domesticated via a commensal pathway and that repeated admixtures between the domesticated lineage and its wild ancestors, the grey wolves (Canis lupus), were probably an inherent character of the whole process [1,2,3]
Analysis in GenBank showed that both mtDNA haplotypes found in the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog (CSW) were shared with other domestic breeds but not with wolves
The same evidence seems to be associated with the Ychromosome, as we found that none of the two Y-haplotypes detected in the 32 CSW males we analyzed for this study were shared with Carpathian wolf (CW)
Summary
Recent genomic studies indicate that dogs were domesticated via a commensal pathway and that repeated admixtures between the domesticated lineage and its wild ancestors, the grey wolves (Canis lupus), were probably an inherent character of the whole process [1,2,3]. Human-controlled hybridization of dogs with their wild ancestors has been repeatedly performed in captivity and gave rise to recently commercialized Wolfdog breeds such as the Saarloos Wolfdog, the Lupo Italiano, the Kunming Wolfdog and the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog [7]. The latter originated from first-generation German Shepherd (GS) x Carpathian wolf (CW) hybrids (F1) obtained in 1958 as a military project in the former Czechoslovakia [8]. The number of CSW continues to increase all over the world and the breed is currently getting more and more diffuse with a relevant economic impact among breeders, only a few scientific studies describing the standard of the breed are available so far [4,9,10]
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