The genomic basis of adaptive evolution in threespine sticklebacks

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.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Nature

• Publication date

  2012-03-26

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/nature10944PMID 22481358PMCID 3322419
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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