Balancing selection and heterozygote advantage in major histocompatibility complex loci of the bottlenecked Finnish wolf population.

Maintaining effective immune response is an essential factor in the survival of small populations. One of the most important immune gene regions is the highly polymorphic major histocompatibility complex ( MHC). We investigated how a population bottleneck and recovery have influenced the diversity and selection in three MHC class II loci, DLA- DRB1, DLA- DQA1 and DLA- DQB1, in the Finnish wolf population. We studied the larger Russian Karelian wolf population for comparison and used 17 microsatellite markers as reference loci. The Finnish and Karelian wolf populations did not differ substantially in their MHC diversities ( [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]