Once upon a time, a master student came to the FIWI. She was really, really eager to work on native predators, and was an excellent candidate - and the *EpiWolf* project was born.
Knowing a wild animal's age is crucial for many management aspects, e.g. for population models. In the case of the wolf Canis lupus, age is also forensically relevant: reproductive (> 2yr) individuals must (currently) not be regulated. Many ways exist to estimate wild animal age: horns, teeth, hooves, size... In the case of wolves, teeth wear and bone development are common proxies. Another emerging tool are DNA methylation patterns, which correlate with age to great precision. These epigenetic clocks need to be calibrated for the particular species and the particular habitat, but once that is done, the correlations with biological age are tight (down to three weeks in e.g. mice).
EpiWolf 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.
After thorough optimization of sampling and extraction protocols, we have collected PacBio Revio data from ~20 individuals and established a preliminary analysis pipeline. Marion has since left to work with live predators in the African savanna, but we continue her work and aim to complete the analysis runs in the near future.
Project team
Marion Meli (Master student)
Prof. Irene Adrian-Kalchhauser (PI)
Dr. Mirjam Pewsner (Co-PI)
Dr. Simone Oberhänsli (Bioinformatics)
Collaboration
Institute for Genetics (Prof. Tosso Leeb, Dr. Vidya Jagannathan)
/240425-iak
