Chromosomal Fusions Facilitate Adaptation to Divergent Environments in Threespine Stickleback.

ABSTRACT: Chromosomal fusions are hypothesized to facilitate adaptation to divergent environments, both by bringing together previously unlinked adaptive alleles and by creating regions of low recombination that facilitate the linkage of adaptive alleles; but, there is little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. Here, we address this knowledge gap by studying threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), in which ancestral marine fish have repeatedly adapted to freshwater across the northern hemisphere. By comparing the threespine and ninespine stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) genomes to a de novo assembly of the fourspine stickleback (Apeltes quadracus) and an outgroup species, we find two chromosomal fusion events involving the same chromosomes have occurred independently in the thre

SUBMITTER: Liu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8826639 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature