Genome-wide Parallelism Underlies Rapid Freshwater Adaptation Fueled by Standing Genetic Variation in a Wild Fish.

ABSTRACT: A fundamental focus of ecological and evolutionary biology is determining how natural populations adapt to environmental changes. Rapid parallel phenotypic evolution can be leveraged to uncover the genetics of adaptation. Using population genomic approaches, we investigated the genetic architecture underlying rapid parallel freshwater adaptation of Neosalanx brevirostris by comparing four freshwater-resident populations with their common ancestral anadromous population. We demonstrated that the rapid parallel adaptation to freshwater followed a complex polygenic architecture and was characterized by genomic-level parallelism, which proceeded predominantly through repeated selection on the preexisting standing genetic variations. Frequencies of the genome-wide adaptive standing variations w

SUBMITTER: Yang H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12279437 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature