Genetic variation in offspring indirectly influences the quality of maternal behaviour in mice
- University of Manchester, United Kingdom
- University of Mancehster, United Kingdom
- Cited
- 2
- Views
- 1,241
- Comments
- 0
Abstract
Conflict over parental investment between parent and offspring is predicted to lead to selection on genes expressed in offspring for traits influencing maternal investment, and on parentally expressed genes affecting offspring behaviour. However, the specific genetic variants that indirectly modify maternal or offspring behaviour remain largely unknown. Using a cross-fostered population of mice, we map maternal behaviour in genetically uniform mothers as a function of genetic variation in offspring and identify loci on offspring chromosomes 5 and 7 that modify maternal behaviour. Conversely, we found that genetic variation among mothers influences offspring development, independent of offspring genotype. Offspring solicitation and maternal behaviour show signs of coadaptation as they are negatively correlated between mothers and their biological offspring, which may be linked to costs of increased solicitation on growth found in our study. Overall, our results show levels of parental provisioning and offspring solicitation are unique to specific genotypes.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the University of Manchester Ethics Committee.
Reviewing Editor
- Jonathan Flint, Reviewing Editor, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Received: September 23, 2015
- Accepted: December 17, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 23, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 9, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Ashbrook et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,241
- Page views
-
- 256
- Downloads
-
- 2
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.
Comments
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Download citations (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Further reading
-
- Developmental Biology and Stem Cells
