The genomic substrate for adaptive radiation in African cichlid fish
Author(s)
Lander, Eric Steven
DownloadLander_The genomic.pdf (2.924Mb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Cichlid fishes are famous for large, diverse and replicated adaptive radiations in the Great Lakes of East Africa. To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying cichlid phenotypic diversity, we sequenced the genomes and transcriptomes of five lineages of African cichlids: the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), an ancestral lineage with low diversity; and four members of the East African lineage: Neolamprologus brichardi/pulcher (older radiation, Lake Tanganyika), Metriaclima zebra (recent radiation, Lake Malawi), Pundamilia nyererei (very recent radiation, Lake Victoria), and Astatotilapia burtoni (riverine species around Lake Tanganyika). We found an excess of gene duplications in the East African lineage compared to tilapia and other teleosts, an abundance of non-coding element divergence, accelerated coding sequence evolution, expression divergence associated with transposable element insertions, and regulation by novel microRNAs. In addition, we analysed sequence data from sixty individuals representing six closely related species from Lake Victoria, and show genome-wide diversifying selection on coding and regulatory variants, some of which were recruited from ancient polymorphisms. We conclude that a number of molecular mechanisms shaped East African cichlid genomes, and that amassing of standing variation during periods of relaxed purifying selection may have been important in facilitating subsequent evolutionary diversification.
Date issued
2014-09Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of BiologyJournal
Nature
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Brawand, David, Catherine E. Wagner, Yang I. Li, Milan Malinsky, Irene Keller, Shaohua Fan, Oleg Simakov, et al. “The Genomic Substrate for Adaptive Radiation in African Cichlid Fish.” Nature 513, no. 7518 (September 3, 2014): 375–381.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
0028-0836
1476-4687