Sonification of genomic data to represent genetic load in zoo populations

Martin, Edward J., Speak, Samuel A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4207-7562, Urban, Lara, Morales, Hernán E. and van Oosterhout, Cock ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5653-738X (2024) Sonification of genomic data to represent genetic load in zoo populations. Zoo Biology. ISSN 0733-3188

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability Statement: All supplementary materials including our algorithm, input midi file, example questionnaire, and the data used to create our sonifications, are made available as a Jupyter Notebook available at https://github.com/sonifyed/pinkpigeons. Funding information: .J.M. was funded by East of Scotland Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership (EASTBIO) funded by UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Grant Number BB/M010996/1. C.v.O. was funded by the Royal Society International Collaboration Awards (ICA∖R1∖201194) and the Earth and Life Systems Alliance (ELSA), S.A.S. was funded by a NERC ARIES PhD studentship (T209447) at the UEA and a Research Training Support Grant (RTSG; 100162318RA1). H.M. was funded by an EMBO fellowship (Grant 1111–2018) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie (Grant 840519). Rights Retention Statement: For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	05 Sep 2024 09:34
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2024 20:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96569
DOI:	10.1002/zoo.21859

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