Abstract
Unlike their wolf ancestors, dogs have unique social skills for communicating and cooperating with humans. Previously, significant heritabilities for human-directed social behaviors have been found in laboratory beagles. Here, a Genome-Wide Association Study identified two genomic regions associated with dog’s human-directed social behaviors. We recorded the propensity of laboratory beagles, bred, kept and handled under standardized conditions, to initiate physical interactions with a human during an unsolvable problem-task, and 190 individuals were genotyped with an HD Canine SNP-chip. One genetic marker on chromosome 26 within the SEZ6L gene was significantly associated with time spent close to, and in physical contact with, the human. Two suggestive markers on chromosome 26, located within the ARVCF gene, were also associated with human contact seeking. Strikingly, four additional genes present in the same linkage blocks affect social abilities in humans, e.g., SEZ6L has been associated with autism and COMT affects aggression in adolescents with ADHD. This is, to our knowledge, the first genome-wide study presenting candidate genomic regions for dog sociability and inter-species communication. These results advance our understanding of dog domestication and raise the use of the dog as a novel model system for human social disorders.
Highlights
Dogs show intentional referential communicative behavior towards humans, involving both attentionseeking and directional components e.g. in problem-solving situations[8,9,10]
We rather use a within-breed association study to search for genetic associations with quantitative traits, which has the advantage of reducing locus heterogeneity, similar to what is seen in studies of geographically isolated human populations in countries such as Iceland or Finland[19]
The dogs, all genotyped with an HD Canine SNP-chip, were allowed to manipulate a device where they could obtain two treats, but a third had been made inaccessible
Summary
Dogs show intentional referential communicative behavior towards humans, involving both attentionseeking and directional components e.g. in problem-solving situations[8,9,10]. We used this population to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in order to map candidate genes associated with the social skills of the dogs. Previous studies generally focus on interactions between members of the same species, while genetics of interspecies communication in mammals – a central aspect of domestication – have received less attention. We rather use a within-breed association study to search for genetic associations with quantitative traits (social behavior), which has the advantage of reducing locus heterogeneity, similar to what is seen in studies of geographically isolated human populations in countries such as Iceland or Finland[19]. We conducted a dense genome-wide association study (GWAS) on human-directed social behaviors in a population of beagles bred, kept and handled under highly standardized conditions. The aim was to identify possible candidate genes, which can increase our understanding of the evolution of domesticated social behavior in dogs
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