On the Origin of Domestic Species—Researchers Find Rabbits Provide Genetic Answers to An Ancient Question

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Domestication is a fairly common quandary of science that we take for granted in our daily lives. Every morning when you take your Shepherd or Pomeranian out for his breakfast and stroll around town, thousands of years of artificial selection and carefully planned science follows you. It's the key to their disposition, loving affection and innate trust of humans, and it's a scientific secret that is widely studied but not fully understood.

The domestication of livestock and companion species like dogs and cats started as early as 15,000 years ago, when our ancient ancestors found the importance of having the help of animals on their side. Perhaps one of the most essential technological revolutions in human history, domestication has long been a process practiced and refined.

In fact, researchers in Russia's cold tundra recently domesticated foxes in hopes of making them more trusting of fur trappers in the large fur industry, but found that nature had clever responses to the selfish domestication. Whatever genetic predisposition led for domesticated pups to trust and come to love their human companions, also gave them flawed spotted fur in the eyes of the trapper. So genetics helped them play a trick and outplay the traps that artificial selection had put in place.

Looking at these past anomalies, an international team of researchers decided to look at much closer product of domestication to learn a bit more about the genetics behind the successful approach. Publishing their findings in the journal Science yesterday Aug. 29, the team found that the origins of history's Peter Rabbit gave insights into the genetic and developmental changes found in domesticated house bunnies worldwide.

Domesticated roughly 1400 years ago in the monasteries of southern France, rabbits have become a docile and passive pet that has all but lost their genetic disposition to flee. Sampling six different breeds of domestic rabbits and wild rabbits found at 14 different locations across the Iberian Peninsula and in southern France, the researchers were able to sequence their entire genomes to find changes that have come from centuries of artificial selection and stable breeding.

"The genetic changes underlying the initial steps of animal domestication are still poorly understood" lead researcher Miguel Carneiro says. "Enrichment analyses suggest that genes affecting brain and neuronal development have often been targeted during domestication."

The research team found that across all six breeds that domesticated rabbits had far less apt "flight" responses, which cause wild rabbits to be supremely alert and reactive to their predatory surroundings; a neurological change caused by multiple genetic variations that tend to be regulatory regions associated with early brain development. Shedding light on the process of domestication nearly 14 centuries after it took place, the researchers hope that their discoveries may help give humans a better understanding of the events that transformed human civilization millennia ago.