Hyperaggression in Rats

[Tiassa]

Hyperaggression in Rats

Sometimes valuable research sounds, on its face, like a bad idea. Roger Highfield notes a long-running experiment that sounds more like the basis for an apocalypse blockbuster:

He caught wild rats around the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and selectively bred two colonies on a farm a few kilometres away, hoping to mimic the process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated animals. One colony was selected for tameness, the other for aggression.

Belyaev died in 1985, but the experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila Trut, at the city's Institute of Cytology and Genetics. In 2003, geneticist Svante Pääbo visited Novosibirsk and the experiment. He was stunned by the vast changes in the animals' behaviour and how quickly these had been induced.

The rats bred for tameness were incredibly easy to handle, while the aggressive ones were so prone to scream and bite that Pääbo said: "I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages."

Since returning to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Pääbo and colleague Frank Albert have been researching which of the rats' genes were selected for by the domestication process. They have now found several key regions of the genome that have a strong effect on tameness and suspect at least half a dozen genes are involved. The next step is to locate individual genes that influence tameness and aggression. "We're currently pursuing several approaches to home in on the genes and all of them are in their early days," says Albert.​

I would only note that it ought to be illegal to have two consecutive umlauts in your name.

Oh, right. At any rate, Albert, Pääbo, and a few others have thrown together a nifty paper, "Genetic Architecture of Tameness in a Rat Model of Animal Domestication" (2009):

A common feature of domestic animals is tameness—i.e., they tolerate and are unafraid of human presence and handling. To gain insight into the genetic basis of tameness and aggression, we studied an intercross between two lines of rats (Rattus norvegicus) selected over >60 generations for increased tameness and increased aggression against humans, respectively. We measured 45 traits, including tameness and aggression, anxiety-related traits, organ weights, and levels of serum components in >700 rats from an intercross population. Using 201 genetic markers, we identified two significant quantitative trait loci (QTL) for tameness. These loci overlap with QTL for adrenal gland weight and for anxiety-related traits and are part of a five-locus epistatic network influencing tameness. An additional QTL influences the occurrence of white coat spots, but shows no significant effect on tameness. The loci described here are important starting points for finding the genes that cause tameness in these rats and potentially in domestic animals in general.​

I mean, it is important and interesting science, but right now I have headlines screaming through my head:

• Russia Trembles After Siberian Massacre

• Gingrich: World-Saving "Scientist" Not Hot Enough to Save World

• Steven Segal Eaten by Rats

• President Calls Rat Horde "Intransigent", Calls for Negotiation

• Hillary Clinton Eaten by Rats

• McCain: Best Solution is to Bomb Iran

• Ratacoochie! Posh Spice's Outrageous Upskirt!

• Palin: I Told You I Can See Russia From My House!​

At any rate, I'll let all my properly scientific neighbors come up with more headlines do all the sciency talk. I'll be in the corner, cracking the occasional slightly relevant joke and reassuring the cat.
____________________


Highfield, Roger. "Beyond Room 101: The hyperaggressive rat". New Scientist. August 15, 2011. NewScientist.com. August 17, 2011. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/08/beyond-room-101-the-hyperaggre.html

Albert, Frank W. et al. "Genetic Architecture of Tameness in a Rat Model of Animal Domestication". Genetics Society of America. 2009. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. August 17, 2011. http://email.eva.mpg.de/~paabo/pdf1/Albert_Genetic_Genetics_2009.pdf

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

. . . . geneticist Svante Pääbo . . . . I would only note that it ought to be illegal to have two consecutive umlauts in your name.

Finnish orthography is pretty simple. A long vowel is indicated by writing it twice. If it happens to be an Ä (pronounced like the A in "rat," my feeble attempt to stay on topic), ya git two of 'em.

 

[Tiassa]

Too many cartoons, and other notes

Finnish orthography is pretty simple. A long vowel is indicated by writing it twice. If it happens to be an Ä (pronounced like the A in "rat," my feeble attempt to stay on topic), ya git two of 'em.

It's just hard to type properly on a keyboard set to US English.

But in terms of the topic, I'm really not sure where to go with it. Damn near anything I might start with will end up as a political or philosophical argument, and I haven't enough beer at present to go tavern style about it.

I mean, sure, okay: Less than sixty generations sounds fast to me.

I can start with that.

And I'll even punch two holes in it. First, it sounds fast to me, but I don't know that it is, scientifically speaking, remarkably so. And, second, I don't know the magnitude of two significant quantitative trait loci defined by 201 genetic markers.

The manifestation sounds sufficiently dramatic: "I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages."

But, quantitatively, I don't know how significant the actual diversity of code is.

To the other, I'm fascinated because this is a really basic sort of experiment that takes a long, long time to carry out, and such projects intrigue me because I don't know how many of these go on. I would imagine it a challenge to maintain protocols over the course of thirty-nine years ... in Siberia.

That, and I have this problem where I'm suddenly anthropomorphizing two of the rats in the photograph that goes with the story:

"This hyperaggressive rat is a legacy of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1972 by Dmitry Belyaev."
(Image credit: Vincent J. Musi, via New Scientist)​

Apparently, these are some of the Belyaev rats. That, and the image filename tells me it's originally a National Geographic photo that has been flipped.

But look at the forward of the two standing rats, and also the posture and "expression" of the crawling rat beside him.

I must be watching too many cartoons.

 

[scheherazade]

Those who raise dogs and horses have long known that personality traits are passed on through breeding and that is why the selection of pairs to mate is of particular importance, as is monitoring the outcome, for many traits express more strongly in the subsequent generation.

The maternal grandsire effect in horses is one such example of selective breeding.

http://www.akc.org/breeders/resp_breeding/Articles/maternalgrandsire.cfm