Zoo-based captive breeding programs typically rely on accurate pedigrees to maintain long-term population genetic diversity and prevent close inbreeding. For many mixed-sex captive populations, it is difficult to assign parentage of offspring with certainty without conducting DNA-based parentage analyses. Using the demographic parameters of a North American captive population of Arabian oryx (O...

Submission of a non-biological parent together with proband for genetic diagnosis would cause misattributed parentage (MP), possibly leading to misinterpretation the pathogenicity genomic variants. Therefore, rapid and cost-effective paternity/maternity test is warranted before testing. Although low-pass genome sequencing (GS) has been widely used clinical germline structural variants, it limit...

Despite the interest that avian brood parasites provoke due to their reproductive strategy, and the wealth of published studies, their mating system is one of the least known aspects of their natural history. This study describes the first attempt to use genetics to characterize mating patterns in a brood parasite, the great spotted cuckoo (Clamator glandarius). We developed a set of microsatel...

BACKGROUND Polyandry is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. In the absence of direct benefits of mating with different males, the underlying basis for polyandry is enigmatic because it can carry considerable costs such as elevated exposure to sexual diseases, physical injury or other direct fitness costs. Such costs may be balanced by indirect genetic benefits to the offspring of polyandr...

Affiliations 1. Phone: +61 4 14 108 439. CC-BY 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was. Abstract Dispersal kernels are the standard method for describing and predicting the relationship between dispersal strength and distance. Statistically-fitted dispersal kernels allow observations of a l...

Mutual policing is an important mechanism that maintains social harmony in group-living organisms by suppressing the selfish behavior of individuals. In social insects, workers police one another (worker-policing) by preventing individual workers from laying eggs that would otherwise develop into males. Within the framework of Hamilton's rule there are two explanations for worker-policing behav...

Most indigenous citrus varieties are assumed to be natural hybrids, but their parentage has so far been determined in only a few cases because of their wide genetic diversity and the low transferability of DNA markers. Here we infer the parentage of indigenous citrus varieties using simple sequence repeat and indel markers developed from various citrus genome sequence resources. Parentage tests...