Survival and divergence in a small group: The extraordinary genomic history of the endangered Apennine brown bear stragglers

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Main Authors: Benazzo, Andrea, Trucchi, Emiliano, Cahill, James A, Maisano Delser, Pierpaolo, Mona, Stefano, Fumagalli, Matteo, Bunnefeld, Lynsey, Cornetti, Luca, Ghirotto, Silvia, Girardi, Stefano, Ometto, Lino, Panziera, Alex, Rota-Stabelli, Omar, Zanetti, Enrico, Karamanlidis, Alexandros
• Other Authors: University of Ferrara, University of California, Santa Cruz, Trinity College, Dublin, Paris Sciences and Letters Research University, Imperial College London, Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Edmund Mach Foundation, ARCTUROS, orcid:0000-0002-9226-7153
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2017
• Subjects: balancing selection; genetic drift; genetic load; Ursus arctos; Neolithic impact; Gentile; Silvia
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26387; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1707279114; http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/26387/1/BenazzoEtAl_FinalSubmitted.pdf

About 100 km east of Rome, in the central Apennine Mountains, a critically endangered population of ∼50 brown bears live in complete isolation. Mating outside this population is prevented by several 100 km of bear-free territories. We exploited this natural experiment to better understand the gene a...