Brown rat demography reveals pre-commensal structure in eastern Asia before expansion into Southeast Asia.

ABSTRACT: Fossil evidence indicates that the globally distributed brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) originated in northern China and Mongolia. Historical records report the human-mediated invasion of rats into Europe in the 1500s, followed by global spread because of European imperialist activity during the 1600s-1800s. We analyzed 14 genomes representing seven previously identified evolutionary clusters, and tested alternative demographic models to infer patterns of range expansion, divergence times, and changes in effective population (N _e) size for this globally important pest species. We observed three range expansions from the ancestral population that produced the Pacific (diverged ∼16.1 kya), eastern China (∼17.5 kya), and Southeast (SE) Asia (∼0.86 kya) lineages. Our mod

SUBMITTER: Puckett EE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6499317 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature