Inbreeding shapes tuberculosis progression in female adult badgers (Meles meles).

J Anim Ecol. 2018 Nov;87(6):1497-1499. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12901. Queirós J1,2, Vicente J3. Author information 1 Centro de Investigacão em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO)/InBio Laboratório Associado, Universidade do Porto, Vairão, Portugal. 2 Departamento de Biologia, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto (FCUP), Porto, Portugal. 3 SaBio Research Group, Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos IREC (CSIC-UCLM-JCCM), Ciudad Real, Spain. Abstract In Focus: Beton, C. H., Delahay, R. J., Smith, F. A. P., Robertson, A., McDonald, R. A., Young, A. J., Burke T. A., & Hodgson, D. (2018). Inbreeding intensifies sex- and age-dependent disease in a wild mammal. Journal of Animal Ecology, 87, 1497-1499. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12878 Increasing crossbreeding of relatives promotes inbreeding which, in turn, can cause a reduction in fitness and the emergence of a phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. Benton et al., used the badger (Meles meles)-Mycobacterium bovis model system to study the relationship between inbreeding, disease, ageing and sex. A link between multilocus homozygosity (general effect) and TB progression (measured as antibody response to infection) and between homozygosity at specific loci (local effect) and TB progression were established in this study, highlighting the importance of host genetic background in determining host disease outcomes, and thus on shaping disease dynamics in wild populations. Moreover, the authors demonstrated for the first time in a natural population that this positive association might be modulated by sex and age. In infected individuals, inbreeding only affects disease progression in adult females. KEYWORDS: fitness-related trait; genomewide and local effect; host genetic background; host-pathogen interactions; inbreeding depression; infectious disease epidemiology; sex and age modulation; wildlife reservoirs of tuberculosis PMID: 30298536 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.12901