Domestication is the proprietary case of evolution: about the universality of principles and elements (review)

Accelerating changes of the biosphere in which the transformation of human activity into a geological force plays an essential role (V.I. Vernadsky, 1944) generate special attention to the management of the genetic flows of domesticated plant and animal species as the basis for existence of the modern humanity. As N.I. Vavilov noted, domestication is “an experimental evolution .... in order to manage it, a historical understanding of the evolutionary process is necessary” (N.I. Vavilov, 1987). The main mechanism of natural and artificial selection consists in the preferential reproduction of the individuals most adapted to the proposed selection conditions, that is, having reproductive success and ensuring the preservation of offspring, which underlies the “self-domestication” of some mammalian species, including humans (L. Raviv et al., 2023). Intraspecific and interspecific differentiation and cooperation for performing population reproduction tasks have been described both in animals (A.M.M. Rodrigues et al., 2023; M.A. Zeder, 2012) and in plants (R. Sharifi, C.M. Ryu, 2021). On the example of prokaryotes, it was shown that culturing under different conditions leads to a significant differentiation in cell behavior (t.e., in colony formation) in generations, and these changes are irreversible, i.e., evolution does not go backwards (“discrimination of relatives”) (O. Rendueles et al., 2015). In multicellular organisms, a significant contribution to the irreversibility of evolution is made by symbionts, the “cooperants” at the cellular (E. Rosenberg et al., 2010) and genomic (M. Ramakrishnan et al., 2021) levels. In domesticated plants and animals, most of the genome is occupied by mobile genetic elements - transposons (TE) and the products of their recombination (D. Almojil et al., 2021). Autonomous TE are descendants of exogenous viruses and sources of the main components of networks regulating gene expression profiles that affect hybridization, stress reactivity (K. Mukherjee, L.L. Moroz, 2023). Despite significant differences in the dominance of TE variants, there are certain similarities between TEs in terms of participation in basic biological processes in plants and animals, such as the formation of interphase nuclear architecture, motifs for transcription regulatory factors, etc. (Y. Qiu, C. Köhler, 2020). It should be noted that the early stages of evolution were based on the differentiation and cooperation of protobiopolymers (RNA, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates) (Y. Shi et al., 2023), prokaryotes and eukaryotes (J. Brueckner, W.F. Martin, 2020; C. Al Jewari, S.L. Baldauf, 2023). The data obtained indicate that differentiation and cooperation are universal elements of the entire evolutionary process, in which mutualistic relationships between a multicellular organism, its microbiota, viruses and their descendants play a key role. This circumstance must be taken into account in the search for methods of managing the genetic flows of human-domesticated species in order to preserve and improve them.