Behavioral Genetics

Animal Models
Instructor: Anne Simon

Minute papers
Connecting different environmental cues to biological
systems (ie. which genes ultimately become up- or downregulated as a result of what type of environmental
stimulus)
- Do negatively stigmatized environments always result in an
unfavourable phenotype, and what other biological
systems must interact that leads to a broad spectrum of
response; for example, not all children that are abused or
maltreated become violent.... what is different in those that
do not?

Class opinion: What do we think?

Is behaviour a phenotype?

Does behaviour evolve?

What are examples of traits that a behavioural geneticist might study?

Is behaviour affected more by environment or by genes?

Is the study of behavioural genetics contentious?

Do plants, bacteria, moulds, insects, etc behave?

Class opinion: What do we think?

Is behaviour a phenotype?

It is to an extent.
A phenotype is the resulting trait of a genotype
However, behavior cannot completely be a phenotype as it
is not solely dependent on genetics. Behaviour is impacted
by the environment as well, so it is a multifactorial
phenotype .

Behavior is not impacted by environment

all the time: Sometime, no effect of
environment:
Example the white or dunce genes in
Drosophila
Phenotype is inherited: a behavior that is

Class opinion: What do we think?

Does behaviour evolve?

Behaviour does indeed evolve via natural selection:

Animals can perform social and altruistic behaviours that
are responsive to short-term and long-term consequences,
such as altruism, reciprocity, kin selection, and eusociality.
Hamilton, W. D. The genetical evolution of social behaviour.
International Journal of Theoretical Biology7, 1-16 (1964).
Sherman, P. W. Nepotism and the evolution of alarm calls.
Science197, 1246-1253 (1977).
Wilkinson, G. S. Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat.
Nature308, 181-184 (1984).

Class opinion: What do we think?

What are examples of traits that a behavioural geneticist might study?

Traits that are used in a day to day routine which give rise
to a normal or abnormal behaviors are being examined by
behavioral genetics.
For example:
the genetics behind the occurrence of Schizophrenia,
twin studies which give rise to maladaptive behaviors
Aggression

Traits that are:

observable,
quantifiable,
And inherited,
Performed in response to a stimulus.

Class opinion: What do we think?

Is behaviour affected more by environment or by genes?

Cant tell before perform appropriate studies.

Depends on behaviour studied.

Class opinion: What do we think?

Is the study of behavioural genetics contentious?

The study of behavioural genetics, in our current time, is

contentious:
the design of studies and use of current model organisms may
not be sufficient or concrete evidence to extrapolate experimental
claims to human behavior.

The designs are not bad. It is good science. Behavioural

genetics is interesting in itself, beyond possible
applications to human behavior.
Public hype et media extrapolation are wrong.
Contentious because of its possible inappropriate /
unethical uses by entities such as government,
insurances etc

Class opinion: What do we think?

Do plants, bacteria, moulds, insects, etc behave?

Yes plants, bacteria, and insects behave.

For example:
Venus flytrap closes its mouth when a fly
lands on it.
A sun flower moves to follow the sun
Bacteria can move toward a chemical
These are all responses to environmental stimuli

At the end of the unit, you will have

seen:
Gross evidence of genetic influence on behaviour
Evidence from artificial selection
Evidence from inbred strains
Evidence from adoption (in humans)
Evidence from cross-fostering (in animals)
Consider how selection and inbreeding studies inform our
understanding of genetic influences on behaviour
Understand how genetic effects are often conditioned to the
environment

Quantitative Genetic experiments to

investigate animal behavior
Model: needs genetic and phenotypic variability
1/ Selection studies
If a trait is heritable, you can breed selectively
for it dogs and lab mice
2/ Inbreed Strain studies
Genetically influenced traits will show average
differences in the same environment

Selection Experiments
social

herding, guarding

hunting, retreivin
on comand

hunt independentl
from sight or scen

vermin
extermination
guarding, fighting, drafting

Dog and human co-evolution

Dogs split from gray wolves about 32,000
years ago
Since then, domestic dogs' brains and
digestive organs have evolved in ways very
similar to the brains and organs of humans.
common environment drove both dog and
human evolution for thousands of years.

http://www.livescience.com/31997-dogs-and-humans-evolved-together.html

Fox domestication
Foxes are normally wary of humans and tend to
bite.

Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, Neiderhiser: Behavioral Genetics, 6e

Copyright 2013 by Worth Publishers

Fox domestication
New Nice RadioLab
http://www.radiolab.org/story/new-nice/

Animals NPR
Domesticated Foxes: Man's New Best Friend?
http
://www.npr.org/2012/03/18/148758624/domesticatedfoxes-mans-new-bestfriend

Domestication syndrome
Domesticated mammals possess a distinctive and
unusual suite of heritable traits not seen in their
wild progenitors
Behavioral (selected for):
Tameness
Reduced aggression, increased docility
involves down regulated fight-or-flight response
Also observed:
Reduced brain size (2% in foxes up to 35% in pigs)
not well understood

Domestication syndrome
Physiology:
Areas of depigmentation
white spots, or large brown areas
Reduced facial skeleton
shorter snout and smaller jaws
Reduced tooth size
Floppy ears
No single mutations has been found to mimic the effect of
domestication
but many point mutations, recombination of repeat
elements, and epimutations

Domestication syndrome hypothesis

Loss of neural crest cells

Tameness

Wilkins A S et al. Genetics 2014;197:795-808

Copyright 2014 by the Genetics Society of America

Crash course on vertebrate development

(human): early embryogenesis

Crash course on vertebrate development

(human): early embryogenesis

Histogenesis of the 3 germ layers

Neural crest origin

Derivatives of cranial and trunk

neural crest populations.

Neural Crest Cells fate

What to remember

Selective breeding: breeding for a phenotype over several

generations by selecting parents with high scores on the
phenotype, mating them, and assessing their offspring to
determine their score to selection.
Only strongly inherited traits can be selected.
Rarely is only one trait passed on alone
Molecular analysis of the selected lines, compared to the
parental could lead to genes identification
Domestication syndrome and neural crest cell
hypothesis
Describe the syndrome
know enough of embryogenesis to explain the neural
crest cell hypothesis

Next class
Reading assignment:
Chap 5, 6: Aniaml models + Human behavior

Minute-paper
What did you learn today?
What would you like to better understand?