UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF ANIMAL DOMESTICATION

With the incommensurable advancements in the field of genomics, researchers are finding it necessary to extensively revise the traditional and widely accepted depictions of the processes underlying animals domestication.

While many questions persist and are fuelled by the new findings encountered, the innovative tools which came into the picture in the last decade, especially in what comes to whole-genome sequencing, and that are increasingly growing much more inexpensive and accessible, support a robust and insightful scenario that portrays domestication as a phenomenon associated with multiple genetic changes and resulting from extended periods of continuous mixture between domestic and wild populations.

This subject is unquestionably attracting the interest of the scientific community worldwide, with researchers focusing their attention on the evolution of animals such as horses, chickens, pigs, and rabbits. However, by studying a comparatively less popular animal – the donkey – CIBIO-InBIO researcher Albano Beja-Pereira has made an important contribution to advance the state-of-the-art on the evolution of wild asses and the domestication of donkeys. In particular, in 2004, Albano led a study published by the journal Science, which unveiled the East African ancestry of wild donkeys.

The impact of Albano’s past and current work has now been acknowledged in a Feature article published by the Oxford journal BioScience.

To know more about this topic, please read the article:

Unraveling the Mysteries of Animal Domestication | BioScience | Jan 2015: 65 (1)