In house mice, genetic compatibility is influenced by the t haplotype, a driving selfish genetic element with a recessive lethal allele, imposing fundamental costs on mate choice decisions. Here, we evaluate the cost of genetic incompatibility and its implication for mate choice in a wild house mice population. In laboratory reared mice, we detected no fertility (number of embryos) or fecundity...

HE events that take place in the development of the mammalian T embryo have not been subjected to an extensive causal analysis so far. The reasons for this are“to be found mainly in the lack of suitable methods. It is not possible yet to use transplantation, isolation or vital staining techniques on mammalian embryos as they have been used on amphibian embryos. In the course of time it probably...

er's 1716 description of a spontaneous variety cross in Zea Mays. Cotton Mather's is still our earliest authentic description of plant hybridization. In spite of the popular names for the oaks used by Lawson, however, there is little doubt but that he was really describing the actual results of introgression, although he may well have been unaware of the fact. Unfortunately, when we translate S...

One approach to understanding the genetic basis of speciation is to scan the genomes of recently diverged taxa to identify highly differentiated regions. The house mouse, Mus musculus, provides a useful system for the study of speciation. Three subspecies (M. m. castaneus, M. m. domesticus, and M. m. musculus) diverged ∼350 KYA, are distributed parapatrically, show varying degrees of reproducti...

rates of robertsonian chromosomal evolution in the Western European house mouse are about two orders of magnitude greater than for most other mammals. This has resulted in a remarkable diversity of karyotypic races in a very short period of time. Recent studies are beginning to shed light on the relative contributions of mutation, drift, selection and meiotic drive in producing this pattern.

A quarter of a century before the advent of biochemical tools for taxonomic approaches, Schwarz and Schwarz (1943) published a pioneering survey of the systematics of the house mouse. All taxa were then considered as subspecies of the house mouse (Mus musculus). In other words, there was only one species within the subgenus Mus. It was a relatively large-scale study, but the taxonomic criteria ...

Behavioural isolation may lead to complete speciation when partial postzygotic isolation acts in the presence of divergent-specific mate-recognition systems. These conditions exist where Mus musculus musculus and M. m. domesticus come into contact and hybridize. We studied two mate-recognition signal systems, based on urinary and salivary proteins, across a Central European portion of the mouse...

role in the study of genetics ever since Carl Correns, Hugo De Vries, and Erich Von Tschermak independently rediscovered Mendel’s laws at the beginning of the twentieth century. Because these three scientists, as well as Mendel himself, performed their research entirely on plants, many in the scientific community questioned whether Mendel’s laws could explain the basis for inheritance in animal...

We report on a genome-wide scan for introgression between the house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) and the Algerian mouse (Mus spretus), using samples from the ranges of sympatry and allopatry in Africa and Europe. Our analysis reveals wide variability in introgression signatures along the genomes, as well as across the samples. We find that fewer than half of the autosomes in each genome harb...