Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower Mimulus guttatus is maintained by a chromosomal inversion.

ABSTRACT: Organisms exhibit an incredible diversity of life history strategies as adaptive responses to environmental variation. The establishment of novel life history strategies involves multilocus polymorphisms, which will be challenging to establish in the face of gene flow and recombination. Theory predicts that adaptive allelic combinations may be maintained and spread if they occur in genomic regions of reduced recombination, such as chromosomal inversion polymorphisms, yet empirical support for this prediction is lacking. Here, we use genomic data to investigate the evolution of divergent adaptive ecotypes of the yellow monkey flower Mimulus guttatus. We show that a large chromosomal inversion polymorphism is the major region of divergence between geographically widespread annual and perenni

SUBMITTER: Twyford AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5029580 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature