Maternal effects on anogenital distance in a wild marmot population

In mammals, prenatal exposure to sex steroid hormones may have profound effects on later behavior and fitness and have been reported under both laboratory and field conditions. Anogenital distance is a non-invasive measure of prenatal exposure to sex steroid hormones. While we know that intra-uterin...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fouqueray, Timothée D., Blumstein, Daniel T., Monclús, Raquel, Martin, Julien G A
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2014
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/666254
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/666254
https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092718
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Gene-Environment Interaction
Marmota
Maternal Exposure
Pregnancy
Sex Ratio
Biología y Biomedicina / Biología
Descripción
Sumario:In mammals, prenatal exposure to sex steroid hormones may have profound effects on later behavior and fitness and have been reported under both laboratory and field conditions. Anogenital distance is a non-invasive measure of prenatal exposure to sex steroid hormones. While we know that intra-uterine position and litter sex ratio influence anogenital distance, there are other, heretofore unstudied, factors that could influence anogenital distance, including maternal effects. We capitalized on a long-term study of wild yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) to study the importance of maternal effects on explaining variation in anogenital distance and found significant effects. The strength of these effects varied annually. Taken together, our data highlights the strong variability due to environmental effects, and illustrates the importance of additive genetic and maternal genetic effects on neonatal anogenital distance. We suspect that, as others apply recently popularised quantitative genetic techniques to study free-living populations, such effects will be identified in other systems