New paper: Colour genes under selection in colourful salamanders


Burgon, J.D., Vieites, D.R., Jacobs, A., Weidt, S.K., Gunter, H.M., Steinfartz, S., Burgess, K., Mable, B.K. and Elmer, K.R., 2020. Functional colour genes and signals of selection in colour polymorphic salamanders. Molecular Ecology. in press online early

Led by PhD student James Burgon, this paper is a favourite! a project started with colleagues in Scotland, Germany and Spain, coming from plans that were long in the pipeline. A new set of colour candidate genes for amphibians.

Abstract
Colouration has been associated with multiple biologically relevant traits that drive adaptation and diversification in many taxa. However, despite the great diversity of colour patterns present in amphibians the underlying molecular basis is largely unknown. Here, we leverage insight from a highly colour‐variable lineage of the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra bernardezi) to identify functional associations with striking variation in colour morph and pattern. The three focal colour morphs—ancestral black‐yellow striped, fully yellow, and fully brown—differed in pattern, visible colouration, and cellular composition. From population genomic analyses of up to 4,702 loci, we found no correlations of neutral population genetic structure with colour morph. However we identified 21 loci with genotype‐phenotype associations, several of which relate to known colour genes. Further, we inferred response to selection at up to 142 loci between the colour morphs, again including several that relate to colouration genes. By transcriptomic analysis across all different combinations, we found 196 differentially expressed genes between yellow, brown, and black skin, 63 of which are candidate genes involved in animal colouration. The concordance across different statistical approaches and ‘omic datasets provide several lines of evidence for loci linked to functional differences between colour morphs, including TYR, CAMK1, and PMEL. We found little association between colour morph and the metabolomic profile of its toxic compounds from the skin secretions. Our research suggests that current ecological and evolutionary hypotheses for the origins and maintenance of these striking colour morphs may need to be revisited.


Popular posts from this blog

NEW PAPER: Genomics of head and body shape parallelism in Arctic charr

Image
Published today as free open access in Molecular Ecology :  Genomic underpinnings of head and body shape in Arctic charr ecomorph pairs Sam Fenton, Arne Jacobs, Colin Bean, Colin Adams & Kathryn Elmer The appearance of repeated phenotypes across replicates in similar environments have been described as examples of parallel evolution. However, the genomic bases of these similar phenotypes is rarely elucidated and so whether the same genomic pathways are used to achieve these similar phenotypes across replicates is rarely known. Here we used the repeated divergence of benthivorous-planktivorous ecomorph pairs of Arctic charr to investigate the genomic underpinnings of head and body shape morphology across replicates. We found that only a small number of associated SNPs for each phenotype were shared across all four ecomorph pairs we investigated with selection on associated SNPs varying considerably across replicates. Overall, these results suggest that the genomic underpinnings ...
Read more