Gene Expression Shifts in Emperor Penguin Adaptation to the Extreme Antarctic Environment.

ABSTRACT: Gene expression can accelerate ecological divergence by rapidly tweaking the response of an organism to novel environments, with more divergent environments exerting stronger selection and supposedly, requiring faster adaptive responses. Organisms adapted to extreme environments provide ideal systems to test this hypothesis, particularly when compared to related species with milder ecological niches. The Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the only endothermic vertebrate breeding in the harsh Antarctic winter, in stark contrast with the less cold-adapted sister species, the King penguin (A. patagonicus). Assembling the first de novo transcriptomes and analysing multi-tissue (brain, kidney, liver, muscle, skin) RNA-Seq data from natural populations of both species, we quantified the s

SUBMITTER: Paris JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12288800 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature