Data from: The impacts of inbreeding, drift, and selection on genetic diversity in captive breeding populations

The goal of captive breeding programs is often to maintain genetic
diversity until reintroductions can occur. However, due in part to changes
that occur in captive populations, approximately one-third of
reintroductions fail. We evaluated genetic changes in captive populations
using microsatellites and mtDNA. We analyzed six populations of
white-footed mice that were propagated for 20 generations using two
replicates of three protocols: random mating (RAN), minimizing mean
kinship (MK), and selection for docility (DOC). We found that MK resulted
in the slowest loss of microsatellite genetic diversity compared to RAN
and DOC. However, the loss of mtDNA haplotypes was not consistent among
replicate lines. We compared our empirical data to simulated data and
found no evidence of selection in the MK lines although some evidence of
selection in the RAN lines was present. Our results suggest that although
the effects of drift may not be fully mitigated, MK reduces the loss of
alleles due to inbreeding more effectively than random mating or docility
selection. Therefore, MK should be preferred for captive breeding.
Furthermore, our simulations show that incorporating microsatellite data
into the MK framework reduced the magnitude of drift, which may have
applications in long-term or extremely genetically depauperate captive
populations.