Pleiotropy facilitates parallel adaptation in sticklebacks.

ABSTRACT: Highly pleiotropic genes are predicted to be used less often during adaptation, as mutations in these loci are more likely to have negative fitness consequences. Following this logic, we tested whether pleiotropy impacts the probability that a locus will be used repeatedly in adaptation. We used two proxies to estimate pleiotropy: number of phenotypic traits affected by a given genomic region and gene connectivity. We first surveyed 16 independent stream-lake and three independent benthic-limnetic ecotype pairs of threespine stickleback to estimate genome-wide patterns in parallel genomic differentiation. Our analysis revealed parallel divergence across the genome; 30%-37% of outlier regions were shared between at least two independent pairs in either the stream-lake or benthic-limnetic co

SUBMITTER: Rennison DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9306781 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature