The study is published in the online early version of the journal Biology Letters. Using a well-documented 50-year pedigree of a population of White Plymouth Rock chickens developed at Virginia Tech by Professor Paul Siegel, the researchers reconstructed how the mitochondrial DNA passed from mothers to daughters within the population. They did this by analysing DNA from the blood samples of 12 chickens of the same generation using the most distantly related maternal lines, knowing that the base population had started from seven partially inbred lines. A selective mating approach within the population started in 1957, resulting in what is now an over tenfold difference in the size of the chickens in the two groups when weighed at 56 days old.
Senior author Professor Greger Larson said: 'Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over longer time periods. Our study shows that evolution can move much faster in the short term than we had believed from fossil-based estimates. Previously, estimates put the rate of change in a mitochondrial genome at about 2% per million years. At this pace, we should not have been able to spot a single mutation in just 50 years, but in fact we spotted two.'
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