How can we determine wolf age and ancestry in a reliable manner?
Animal age is key for population models and for management approaches. In the case of the wolf, age is also forensically relevant, since only < 2yr individuals can be legally regulated in a targeted manner.
DNA methylation patterns correlate with age to great precision. Once an epigenetic clock has been calibrated for a particular species and in a particular habitat, the predictions of the clock correlate tightly with the true biological age of animals.
This project aims to
- establish an analysis pipeline for DNA methylation based on PacBio Revio sequences.
- train a model based on wolf samples of different ages.
- assemble a Swiss wolf pangenome.
- identify areas of introgression and hybridization between wolf subtypes, and between wolves and dogs.
Project team
Prof. Irene Adrian-Kalchhauser (PI)
Dr. Mirjam Pewsner (Co-PI)
Dr. Simone Oberhänsli (Bioinformatics)
Marion Meli (Master student)
Collaboration
Institute for Genetics (Prof. Tosso Leeb, Dr. Vidya Jagannathan)
