Scientist and Prize Winner Lyudmila Trut's Research Featured in Major Publications

Lyudmila Trut. Photo Credit: Vasily Kovaly.

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Research stemming from Russia's Institute of Cytology and Genetics and How To Train a Fox co-author Lyudmila Trut’s work there with fox domestication has been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, "Red Fox Genome Assembly Identifies Genomic Regions Associated with Tame and Aggressive Behaviours" by Anna V. Kukekova et al, highlights a single gene that seems likely to be associated with tameness, as well as identifying 103 genetic regions that differed significantly when looking at a group of bred foxes chosen for their tameness, bred foxes chosen for their aggression, and bred foxes in general.

The research merited a recent mention in The New York Times Trilobites column, "Friendly Foxes’ Genes Offer Hints to How Dogs Became Domesticated." Science also covered the paper with a profile of Kukekova and her research, "These Docile Foxes May Hold Some of the Genetic Keys to Domestication."

You can learn more about the work that inspired this paper in Lee Alan Dugatkin and Trut's How To Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution, which won the 2018 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Young Adult category.