The genomic basis of adaptive evolution in threespine sticklebacks.

Nature
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

Marine stickleback fish have colonized and adapted to thousands of streams and lakes formed since the last ice age, providing an exceptional opportunity to characterize genomic mechanisms underlying repeated ecological adaptation in nature. Here we develop a high-quality reference genome assembly for threespine sticklebacks. By sequencing the genomes of twenty additional individuals from a global set of marine and freshwater populations, we identify a genome-wide set of loci that are consistently associated with marine-freshwater divergence. Our results indicate that reuse of globally shared standing genetic variation, including chromosomal inversions, has an important role in repeated evolution of distinct marine and freshwater sticklebacks, and in the maintenance of divergent ecotypes during early stages of reproductive isolation. Both coding and regulatory changes occur in the set of loci underlying marine-freshwater evolution, but regulatory changes appear to predominate in this well known example of repeated adaptive evolution in nature.

Year of Publication
2012
Journal
Nature
Volume
484
Issue
7392
Pages
55-61
Date Published
2012 Apr 04
ISSN
1476-4687
URL
DOI
10.1038/nature10944
PubMed ID
22481358
PubMed Central ID
PMC3322419
Links
Grant list
R01 HG003474 / HG / NHGRI NIH HHS / United States
P50 HG002568-09S1 / HG / NHGRI NIH HHS / United States
Howard Hughes Medical Institute / United States
095908 / Wellcome Trust / United Kingdom
P50 HG002568 / HG / NHGRI NIH HHS / United States
P50-HG002568 / HG / NHGRI NIH HHS / United States
P50 HG002568-09 / HG / NHGRI NIH HHS / United States