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Larger genomes show improved buffering of adult fitness against environmental stress in seed beetles.

ABSTRACT: Our general understanding of the evolution of genome size (GS) is incomplete, and it has long been clear that GS does not reflect organismal complexity. Here, we assess the hypothesis that larger genomes may allow organisms to better cope with environmental variation. It is, for example, possible that genome expansion due to proliferation of transposable elements or gene duplications may affect the ability to regulate and fine-tune transcriptional profiles. We used 18 populations of the seed beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, which differ in GS by up to 4.5%, and exposed adults and juveniles to environmental stress in a series of experiments where stage-specific fitness was assayed. We found that populations with larger genomes were indeed better buffered against environmental stress for adult, but not for juvenile, fitness. The genetic correlation across populations between GS and canalization of adult fitness is consistent with a role for natural selection in the evolution of GS.

SUBMITTER: Boman J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9873469 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Larger genomes show improved buffering of adult fitness against environmental stress in seed beetles.

Boman Jesper J Arnqvist Göran G

Biology letters 20230125 1

Our general understanding of the evolution of genome size (GS) is incomplete, and it has long been clear that GS does not reflect organismal complexity. Here, we assess the hypothesis that larger genomes may allow organisms to better cope with environmental variation. It is, for example, possible that genome expansion due to proliferation of transposable elements or gene duplications may affect the ability to regulate and fine-tune transcriptional profiles. We used 18 populations of the seed bee ...[more]

PMID: 36693428

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Project description:Whether sexual selection impedes or aids adaptation has become an outstanding question in times of rapid environmental change and parallels the debate about how the evolution of individual traits impacts on population dynamics. The net effect of sexual selection on population viability results from a balance between genetic benefits of "good-genes" effects and costs of sexual conflict. Depending on how these facets of sexual selection are affected under environmental change, extinction of maladapted populations could be either avoided or accelerated. Here, we evolved seed beetles under three alternative mating regimes to disentangle the contributions of sexual selection, fecundity selection, and male-female coevolution to individual reproductive success and population fitness. We compared these contributions between the ancestral environment and two stressful environments (elevated temperature and a host plant shift). We found evidence that sexual selection on males had positive genetic effects on female fitness components across environments, supporting good-genes sexual selection. Interestingly, however, when males evolved under sexual selection with fecundity selection removed, they became more robust to both temperature and host plant stress compared to their conspecific females and males from the other evolution regimes that applied fecundity selection. We quantified the population-level consequences of this sex-specific adaptation and found evidence that the cost of sociosexual interactions in terms of reduced offspring production was higher in the regime applying only sexual selection to males. Moreover, the cost tended to be more pronounced at the elevated temperature to which males from the regime were more robust compared to their conspecific females. These results illustrate the tension between individual-level adaptation and population-level viability in sexually reproducing species and suggest that the relative efficacies of sexual selection and fecundity selection can cause inherent sex differences in environmental robustness that may impact demography of maladapted populations.

Dataset Information

Larger genomes show improved buffering of adult fitness against environmental stress in seed beetles.

Publications

Larger genomes show improved buffering of adult fitness against environmental stress in seed beetles.

Similar Datasets

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