Mosaic genealogy of the Mus musculus genome revealed by 21 nuclear genes from its three subspecies

Abstract

Patterns of genetic variation provide insight into the evolutionary history of a species. Mouse (Mus musculus) is a good model for this purpose. Here we present the analysis of genealogies of the 21 nuclear loci and one mitochondrial DNA region in M. musculus based on our nucleotide sequences of nine inbred strains from three M. musculus subspecies (musculus, domesticus, and castaneus) and one M. spicilegus strain as an outgroup. The mitochondrial DNA gene genealogy of those strains confirmed the introgression pattern of one musculus strain. When all the nuclear DNA data were concatenated to produce a phylogenetic tree of nine strains, musculus and domesticus strains formed monophyletic clusters with each other, while the two castaneus strains were paraphyletic. When each DNA region was treated independently, the phylogenetic networks revealed an unnegligibly high level of subspecies admixture and the mosaic nature of their genome. Estimation of ancestral and derived population sizes and migration rates suggests the effects of ancestral polymorphism and gene flow on the pattern of genetic variation of the current subspecies. Gene genealogies of Fut4 and Dfy loci also suggested existence of the gene flow between M. musculus and M. spicilegus or other distant species.