A butterfly pan-genome reveals that a large amount of structural variation underlies the evolution of chromatin accessibility.

ABSTRACT: Despite insertions and deletions being the most common structural variants (SVs) found across genomes, not much is known about how much these SVs vary within populations and between closely related species, nor their significance in evolution. To address these questions, we characterized the evolution of indel SVs using genome assemblies of three closely related Heliconius butterfly species. Over the relatively short evolutionary timescales investigated, up to 18.0% of the genome was composed of indels between two haplotypes of an individual Heliconius charithonia butterfly and up to 62.7% included lineage-specific SVs between the genomes of the most distant species (11 Mya). Lineage-specific sequences were mostly characterized as transposable elements (TEs) inserted at rando

SUBMITTER: Ruggieri AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9712634 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature