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

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 of these phenotypes are highly variable across lakes. Using a QTL database of salmonid QTLs, we found that a small number of associated SNPs were found in/near regions associated with these phenotypes in other species suggesting that while there is high variability in the genomic bases, some regions may be key across different species. 

This is a thesis chapter for Sam Fenton, who has recently submitted his PhD for examination. Excellent work Sam!