Molecular Evolutionary Consequences of Island Colonization.

ABSTRACT: Island endemics are expected to have low effective population sizes (Ne), first because some may experience population bottlenecks when they are founded, and second because they have restricted ranges. Therefore, we expect island species to have reduced genetic diversity, inefficient selection, and reduced adaptive potential compared with their mainland counterparts. We used both polymorphism and substitution data to address these predictions, improving on the approach of recent studies that only used substitution data. This allowed us to directly test the assumption that island species have small values of Ne We found that island species had significantly less genetic diversity than mainland species; however, this pattern could be attributed to a subset of island species that appeared to

SUBMITTER: James JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4943191 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature