The demographic history of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) in eastern North America

The Western European house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) is a widespread human commensal that has recently been introduced to North America. Its introduction to the Americas is thought to have resulted from the transatlantic movements of Europeans that began in the early 16th century. To study the details of this colonization history, we examine population structure, explore relevant demographic models, and infer the timing of divergence among house mouse populations in the eastern United States using published exome sequences from five North American populations and two European populations. For North American populations of house mice, levels of nucleotide variation were lower, and low-frequency alleles were less common than for European populations. These patterns provide evidence of a mild bottleneck associated with the movement of house mice into North America. Several analyses revealed that one North American population is genetically admixed, which indicates at least two source populations from Europe were independently introduced to eastern North America. Estimated divergence times between North American and German populations ranged between ∼1,000 and 7,000 years ago and overlapped with the estimated divergence time between populations from Germany and France. Demographic models comparing different North American populations revealed that these populations diverged from each other mostly within the last 500 years, consistent with the timing of the arrival of Western European settlers to North America. Together, these results support a recent introduction of Western European house mice to eastern North America, highlighting the effects of human migration and colonization on the spread of an invasive human commensal.