The Structure and Population Genetics of the Breakpoints Associated With the Cosmopolitan Chromosomal Inversion In(3R)Payne in Drosophila melanogaster.
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ABSTRACT: We report here the breakpoint structure and sequences of the Drosophila melanogaster cosmopolitan chromosomal inversion In(3R)P. Combining in situ hybridization to polytene chromosomes and long-range PCR, we have identified and sequenced the distal and proximal breakpoints. The breakpoints are not simple cut-and-paste structures; gene fragments and small duplications of DNA are associated with both breaks. The distal breakpoint breaks the tolkin (tok) gene and the proximal breakpoint breaks CG31279 and the tolloid (tld) gene. Functional copies of all three genes are found at the opposite breakpoints. We sequenced a representative sample of standard (St) and In(3R)P karyotypes for a 2-kb portion of the tok gene, as well as the same 2 kb from the pseudogene tok fragment found at the distal breakpoint of In(3R)P chromosomes. The tok gene in St arrangements possesses levels of polymorphism typical of D. melanogaster genes. The functional tok gene associated with In(3R)P shows little polymorphism. Numerous single-base changes, as well as deletions and duplications, are associated with the truncated copy of tok. The overall pattern of polymorphism is consistent with a recent origin of In(3R)P, on the order of Ne generations. The identification of these breakpoint sequences permits a simple PCR-based screen for In(3R)P.
Project description:We report here the breakpoint structure and sequences of the Drosophila melanogaster cosmopolitan chromosomal inversion In(3R)P. Combining in situ hybridization to polytene chromosomes and long-range PCR, we have identified and sequenced the distal and proximal breakpoints. The breakpoints are not simple cut-and-paste structures; gene fragments and small duplications of DNA are associated with both breaks. The distal breakpoint breaks the tolkin (tok) gene and the proximal breakpoint breaks CG31279 and the tolloid (tld) gene. Functional copies of all three genes are found at the opposite breakpoints. We sequenced a representative sample of standard (St) and In(3R)P karyotypes for a 2-kb portion of the tok gene, as well as the same 2 kb from the pseudogene tok fragment found at the distal breakpoint of In(3R)P chromosomes. The tok gene in St arrangements possesses levels of polymorphism typical of D. melanogaster genes. The functional tok gene associated with In(3R)P shows little polymorphism. Numerous single-base changes, as well as deletions and duplications, are associated with the truncated copy of tok. The overall pattern of polymorphism is consistent with a recent origin of In(3R)P, on the order of Ne generations. The identification of these breakpoint sequences permits a simple PCR-based screen for In(3R)P.
Project description:Chromosomal inversions are thought to play a major role in climatic adaptation. In D. melanogaster, the cosmopolitan inversion In(3R)Payne exhibits latitudinal clines on multiple continents. As many fitness traits show similar clines, it is tempting to hypothesize that In(3R)P underlies observed clinal patterns for some of these traits. In support of this idea, previous work in Australian populations has demonstrated that In(3R)P affects body size but not development time or cold resistance. However, similar data from other clines of this inversion are largely lacking; finding parallel effects of In(3R)P across multiple clines would considerably strengthen the case for clinal selection. Here, we have analysed the phenotypic effects of In(3R)P in populations originating from the endpoints of the latitudinal cline along the North American east coast. We measured development time, egg-to-adult survival, several size-related traits (femur and tibia length, wing area and shape), chill coma recovery, oxidative stress resistance and triglyceride content in homokaryon lines carrying In(3R)P or the standard arrangement. Our central finding is that the effects of In(3R)P along the North American cline match those observed in Australia: standard arrangement lines were larger than inverted lines, but the inversion did not influence development time or cold resistance. Similarly, In(3R)P did not affect egg-to-adult survival, oxidative stress resistance and lipid content. In(3R)P thus seems to specifically affect size traits in populations from both continents. This parallelism strongly suggests an adaptive pattern, whereby the inversion has captured alleles associated with growth regulation and clinal selection acts on size across both continents.
Project description:Chromosomal inversions are among the primary drivers of genome structure evolution in a wide range of natural populations. Although there is an impressive array of theory and empirical analyses that have identified conditions under which inversions can be positively selected, comparatively little data are available on the fitness impacts of these genome structural rearrangements themselves. Because inversion breakpoints can disrupt functional elements and alter chromatin domains, the precise positioning of an inversion's breakpoints can strongly affect its fitness. Here, we compared the fine-scale distribution of low-frequency inversion breakpoints with those of high-frequency inversions and inversions that have gone to fixation between Drosophila species. We identified a number of differences among frequency classes that may influence inversion fitness. In particular, breakpoints that are proximal to insulator elements, generate large tandem duplications, and minimize impacts on gene coding spans which are more prevalent in high-frequency and fixed inversions than in rare inversions. The data suggest that natural selection acts to preserve both genes and larger cis-regulatory networks in the occurrence and spread of rearrangements. These factors may act to limit the availability of high-fitness arrangements when suppressed recombination is favorable.
Project description:Chromosomal inversions have been an enduring interest of population geneticists since their discovery in Drosophila melanogaster. Numerous lines of evidence suggest powerful selective pressures govern the distributions of polymorphic inversions, and these observations have spurred the development of many explanatory models. However, due to a paucity of nucleotide data, little progress has been made towards investigating selective hypotheses or towards inferring the genealogical histories of inversions, which can inform models of inversion evolution and suggest selective mechanisms. Here, we utilize population genomic data to address persisting gaps in our knowledge of D. melanogaster's inversions. We develop a method, termed Reference-Assisted Reassembly, to assemble unbiased, highly accurate sequences near inversion breakpoints, which we use to estimate the age and the geographic origins of polymorphic inversions. We find that inversions are young, and most are African in origin, which is consistent with the demography of the species. The data suggest that inversions interact with polymorphism not only in breakpoint regions but also chromosome-wide. Inversions remain differentiated at low levels from standard haplotypes even in regions that are distant from breakpoints. Although genetic exchange appears fairly extensive, we identify numerous regions that are qualitatively consistent with selective hypotheses. Finally, we show that In(1)Be, which we estimate to be ∼60 years old (95% CI 5.9 to 372.8 years), has likely achieved high frequency via sex-ratio segregation distortion in males. With deeper sampling, it will be possible to build on our inferences of inversion histories to rigorously test selective models-particularly those that postulate that inversions achieve a selective advantage through the maintenance of co-adapted allele complexes.
Project description:Paracentric inversions in populations can have a profound effect on the pattern and organization of nucleotide variability along a chromosome. Regions near inversion breakpoints are expected to have greater levels of differentiation because of reduced genetic exchange between different gene arrangements whereas central regions in the inverted segments are predicted to have lower levels of nucleotide differentiation due to greater levels of genetic flux among different karyotypes. We used the inversion polymorphism on the third chromosome of Drosophila pseudoobscura to test these predictions with an analysis of nucleotide diversity of 18 genetic markers near and away from inversion breakpoints. We tested hypotheses about how the presence of different chromosomal arrangements affects the pattern and organization of nucleotide variation. Overall, markers in the distal segment of the chromosome had greater levels of nucleotide heterozygosity than markers within the proximal segment of the chromosome. In addition, our results rejected the hypothesis that the breakpoints of derived inversions will have lower levels of nucleotide variability than breakpoints of ancestral inversions, even when strains with gene conversion events were removed. High levels of linkage disequilibrium were observed within all 11 breakpoint regions as well as between the ends of most proximal and distal breakpoints. The central region of the chromosome had the greatest levels of linkage disequilibrium compared with the proximal and distal regions because this is the region that experiences the highest level of recombination suppression. These data do not fully support the idea that genetic exchange is the sole force that influences genetic variation on inverted chromosomes.
Project description:Chromosomal rearrangements constitute a significant feature of genome evolution, and inversion polymorphisms in Drosophila have been studied intensely for decades. Population geneticists have long recognized that the sequence features associated with inversion breakpoints would reveal much about the mutational origin, uniqueness, and genealogical history of individual inversion polymorphisms, but the cloning of breakpoint sequences is not trivial. With the aid of a method for rapid recovery of DNA clones spanning rearrangement breakpoints, we recover and examine the DNA sequences spanning the breakpoints of the cosmopolitan inversion In(3L)Payne in Drosophila melanogaster. By examining the sequence diversity associated with six standard and seven inverted chromosomes from natural populations, we find that the inversion is monophyletic in origin, the sequences are genetically isolated from recombination at the breakpoints, and there is no association with features such as transposable elements. The inverted sequences show 17-fold less nucleotide polymorphism, but there are eight fixed differences in the region spanning both breakpoints. This suggests that this inversion is not recently derived. Finally, Northern analysis and transcript mapping find that the distal breakpoint has disrupted three transcripts that are normally expressed in the standard arrangement. Incidentally, the method introduced here can be used to isolate breakpoint sequences of arrangements associated with many human diseases.
Project description:BackgroundChromosomal inversions have been pervasive during the evolution of the genus Drosophila, but there is significant variation between lineages in the rate of rearrangement fixation. D. mojavensis, an ecological specialist adapted to a cactophilic niche under extreme desert conditions, is a chromosomally derived species with ten fixed inversions, five of them not present in any other species.ResultsIn order to explore the causes of the rapid chromosomal evolution in D. mojavensis, we identified and characterized all breakpoints of seven inversions fixed in chromosome 2, the most dynamic one. One of the inversions presents unequivocal evidence for its generation by ectopic recombination between transposon copies and another two harbor inverted duplications of non-repetitive DNA at the two breakpoints and were likely generated by staggered single-strand breaks and repair by non-homologous end joining. Four out of 14 breakpoints lay in the intergenic region between preexisting duplicated genes, suggesting an adaptive advantage of separating previously tightly linked duplicates. Four out of 14 breakpoints are associated with transposed genes, suggesting these breakpoints are fragile regions. Finally two inversions contain novel genes at their breakpoints and another three show alterations of genes at breakpoints with potential adaptive significance.ConclusionsD. mojavensis chromosomal inversions were generated by multiple mechanisms, an observation that does not provide support for increased mutation rate as explanation for rapid chromosomal evolution. On the other hand, we have found a number of gene alterations at the breakpoints with putative adaptive consequences that directly point to natural selection as the cause of D. mojavensis rapid chromosomal evolution.
Project description:Sequencing of pools of individuals (Pool-Seq) represents a reliable and cost-effective approach for estimating genome-wide SNP and transposable element insertion frequencies. However, Pool-Seq does not provide direct information on haplotypes so that, for example, obtaining inversion frequencies has not been possible until now. Here, we have developed a new set of diagnostic marker SNPs for seven cosmopolitan inversions in Drosophila melanogaster that can be used to infer inversion frequencies from Pool-Seq data. We applied our novel marker set to Pool-Seq data from an experimental evolution study and from North American and Australian latitudinal clines. In the experimental evolution data, we find evidence that positive selection has driven the frequencies of In(3R)C and In(3R)Mo to increase over time. In the clinal data, we confirm the existence of frequency clines for In(2L)t, In(3L)P and In(3R)Payne in both North America and Australia and detect a previously unknown latitudinal cline for In(3R)Mo in North America. The inversion markers developed here provide a versatile and robust tool for characterizing inversion frequencies and their dynamics in Pool-Seq data from diverse D. melanogaster populations.
Project description:The adaptive character of inversion polymorphism in Drosophila subobscura is well established. The O(ST) and O(3+4) chromosomal arrangements of this species differ by two overlapping inversions that arose independently on O(3) chromosomes. Nucleotide variation in eight gene regions distributed along inversion O(3) was analyzed in 14 O(ST) and 14 O(3+4) lines. Levels of variation within arrangements were quite similar along the inversion. In addition, we detected (i) extensive genetic differentiation between arrangements in all regions, regardless of their distance to the inversion breakpoints; (ii) strong association between nucleotide variants and chromosomal arrangements; and (iii) high levels of linkage disequilibrium in intralocus and also in interlocus comparisons, extending over distances as great as approximately 4 Mb. These results are not consistent with the higher genetic exchange between chromosomal arrangements expected in the central part of an inversion from double-crossover events. Hence, double crossovers were not produced or, alternatively, recombinant chromosomes were eliminated by natural selection to maintain coadapted gene complexes. If the strong genetic differentiation detected along O(3) extends to other inversions, nucleotide variation would be highly structured not only in D. subobscura, but also in the genome of other species with a rich chromosomal polymorphism.