Finding the adaptive needles in a population-structured haystack: A case study in a New Zealand mollusc.

ABSTRACT: Genetic adaptation to future environmental conditions is crucial to help species persist as the climate changes. Genome scans are powerful tools to understand adaptive landscapes, enabling us to correlate genetic diversity with environmental gradients while disentangling neutral from adaptive variation. However, low gene flow can lead to both local adaptation and highly structured populations, and is a major confounding factor for genome scans, resulting in an inflated number of candidate loci. Here, we compared candidate locus detection in a marine mollusc (Onithochiton neglectus), taking advantage of a natural geographical contrast in the levels of genetic structure between its populations. O. neglectus is endemic to New Zealand and distributed throughout an environmental gradient from t

SUBMITTER: Salloum PM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9311215 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature