The Genetic Effects Of Expansive Admixture and Reductive Selection On Modern Domestic Pigs

The entanglement between humans and wild animals resulted in the domestication of plants and animals that led to significant alterations of the genetic, behavioral, and phenotypic characteristics of all the organisms involved. Unraveling the complexity of that process will give us a deeper insight into the genetic and phenotypic makeup of the commercial populations on which human civilization is based.

Domestication necessarily involves only a subset of the total variability present in the wild ancestor and the domestication process likely left a strong bottleneck signature on the genomes of the early captive domestic population. Importantly, however, the initial genetic bottlenecks involved with the first steps in domestication was followed in many species by admixture with a wide variety of local subspecies and sister species that were not involved in the original domestication process. This admixture most likely led to an increase of genetic diversity and in the case of bees, multiple rounds of introgression have led to a domestic population that is more variable than the wild progenitor. The intensification of breeding practices over the past century, however, has once again begun eroding diversity. In this presentation I will present novel data related to the long-term history of pig domestication and discuss the genomic ramifications of commercial pig breed development within the context of other domestic farm animals.