In mice, individuals are known to use this information when they are choosing mates presumably to avoid inbreeding.
One study in Africa has already found that inbreeding has an effect on people's propensity to develop tuberculosis.
Susceptibility to trauma ranging from propeller damage to gunshot wounds did not rise with inbreeding.
Members of the Carneddau Mountain Pony Society round the ponies up once a year to check on numbers and prevent inbreeding.
That is not a surprise, although it is not out of the question that inbreeding might make an animal more accident-prone.
This is good news for conservationists trying to preserve the threatened species as small populations of animals can face problems of inbreeding.
You are unlikely to be the product of inbreeding between recent ancestors.
The solution is that we have to take inbreeding into account.
Inbreeding is clearly bad for sea-lions in all sorts of ways.
In particular, as William Amos, one of Ms Acevedo-Whitehouse's colleagues, points out, levels of inbreeding tend to be lower in expanding populations than in stable ones.
Conservation of the many endangered species which have been reduced to numbers so small that inbreeding is almost inevitable will need to take account of the new knowledge.
But that position would be reviewed in the next few months following the expected publication of research, by scientists at Imperial College, into whether inbreeding had detrimental effects, she added.
However, he said it was important that individuals are not instinctively attracted sexually to people who look like them as inbreeding can increase the risk of disease and genetic disorder significantly.
Indeed, marmot social structure actively encourages inbreeding.
ECONOMIST: Adultery yields benefits to females as well as males
Ten years ago scientists had no other way to track down genes than by combing through large, well-documented family trees, such as those of Mormons, or of relatively inbred populations, such as the Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. (Inbreeding makes gene mutations easier to find.) Such genealogical searches take years.
应用推荐