ArticleZoo biology
Sonification of Genomic Data to Represent Genetic Load in Zoo Populations.
Article in Zoo biology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- A fixed mutation in the respiratory complex I impairs mitochondrial bioenergetics in the endangered Apennine brown bear.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The accumulation of harmful genes within the ROH hotspot regions of the Tibetan sheep genome does not lead to genetic load.BMC genomics · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Maintaining a diverse gene pool is important in the captive management of zoo populations, especially in endangered species such as the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri). However, due to the limited number of breeding individuals and relaxed natural selection, the loss of variation and accumulation of harmful variants is inevitable. Inbreeding results in a loss of fitness (i.e., inbreeding depression), principally because related parents are more likely to transmit a copy of the same recessive deleterious genetic variant to their offspring. Genomics-informed captive breeding can manage harmful variants by artificial selection, reducing the genetic load by avoiding the inheritance of two copies of the same harmful variant. To explain this concept in an interactive way to zoo visitors, we developed a sonification game to represent the fitness impacts of harmful variants by detuning notes in a familiar musical melody (i.e., Beethoven's Für Elise). Conceptually, zoo visitors play a game aiming to create the most optimal pink pigeon offspring in terms of inbreeding depression. They select virtual crosses between pink pigeon individuals and listen for the detuning of the melody, which represents the realised load of the resultant offspring. Here we present the sonification algorithm and the results of an online survey to see whether participants could identify the most and least optimal offspring from three potential pink pigeon offspring. Of our 98 respondents, 85 (86.7%) correctly identified the least optimal offspring, 73 (74.5%) correctly identified the most optimal, and 62 (63.3%) identified both the most and least optimal offspring using only the sonification.
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