Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The correlation between kinship and behaviour in non-human primates
- 2 Co-operation and reciprocity in birds and mammals
- 3 Kinship and fellowship in ants and social wasps
- 4 Successes and failures of parent–offspring recognition in animals
- 5 Kinship, kin discrimination and mate choice
- 6 Genetic components of kin recognition in mammals
- 7 Kin recognition in amphibians
- 8 Kin recognition cues of vertebrates
- 9 Recognizing kin: ontogeny and classification
- 10 Parental states as mechanisms for kinship recognition and deception about relatedness
- 11 Fetal learning: implications for the development of kin recognition
- 12 Information processing and storage during filial imprinting
- 13 The honey bee as a model kin recognition system
- 14 Mutual mother–infant recognition in humans
- Author index
- Species and common name index
- Subject index
6 - Genetic components of kin recognition in mammals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The correlation between kinship and behaviour in non-human primates
- 2 Co-operation and reciprocity in birds and mammals
- 3 Kinship and fellowship in ants and social wasps
- 4 Successes and failures of parent–offspring recognition in animals
- 5 Kinship, kin discrimination and mate choice
- 6 Genetic components of kin recognition in mammals
- 7 Kin recognition in amphibians
- 8 Kin recognition cues of vertebrates
- 9 Recognizing kin: ontogeny and classification
- 10 Parental states as mechanisms for kinship recognition and deception about relatedness
- 11 Fetal learning: implications for the development of kin recognition
- 12 Information processing and storage during filial imprinting
- 13 The honey bee as a model kin recognition system
- 14 Mutual mother–infant recognition in humans
- Author index
- Species and common name index
- Subject index
Summary
In practice, although not in theory, the subject of this chapter – the genetic determination of body scents that distinguish one individual from another individual of the same mammalian species – is fairly new. Systematic work on this topic was made possible by certain incidental observations made by animal technicians responsible for deriving and maintaining congenic mouse strains in a special facility for that purpose at Sloan Kettering Institute, in New York, USA.
Studies on the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)
In general, mice of an inbred strain are genetically identical to one another. Mice of an inbred congenic strain are likewise identical with one another and differ from a selected standard inbred strain only in the vicinity of a particular gene or gene complex. This discrete genetic difference between a pair of congenic strains, meaning a standard inbred strain and its congenic companion strain, is achieved by crossing two inbred strains and then serially back-crossing to the selected inbred parental strain for many generations with selection for an allelic genetic trait of interest, derived from the opposite parental strain, in each generation. Any difference that distinguishes a pair of congenic strains, provided that this is shown to be genetic by appropriate segregation tests, must be due to the selected gene or a gene in that vicinity, i.e. within the small segment of donor chromosome carried over together with the selected gene (Boyse, 1977; Foster et ai, 1981).
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- Information
- Kin Recognition , pp. 148 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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