title: Inbreeding and relatedness in Scandinavian grey wolves Canis lupus.
abstract: Management of small and threatened populations may require detailed knowledge about the genetic status of individuals and the genetic relatedness between individuals. I show here that individual heterozygosity at a set of 29 microsatellite loci correlates closely to the degree of inbreeding in a captive grey wolf population. Microsatellite allele sharing similarly correlates closely to known relatedness between pairs of individuals. Genotyping the same markers in a small (60-70 individuals) natural population of grey wolves in Sweden, low individual heterozygosities and high values of allele sharing between some animals were found. Since inbreeding depression has been documented in a captive grey wolf population of Scandinavian origin, the results point out an additional risk for the small Swedish wild population.
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden. hans.ellegren@evolution.uu.se
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ellegren
mesh_terms: D000483:Alleles; D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D005828:Genetics, Population; D006579:Heterozygote; D007178:Inbreeding; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D010375:Pedigree; D013548:Sweden; D019596:Wolves / Q000235:genetics*