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- Christmas, Matthew J, et al.
(author)
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Chromosomal inversions associated with environmental adaptation in honeybees
- 2019
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In: Molecular Ecology. - : WILEY. - 0962-1083 .- 1365-294X. ; 28:6, s. 1358-1374
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Chromosomal inversions can facilitate local adaptation in the presence of gene flow by suppressing recombination between well-adapted native haplotypes and poorly adapted migrant haplotypes. East African mountain populations of the honeybee Apis mellifera are highly divergent from neighbouring lowland populations at two extended regions in the genome, despite high similarity in the rest of the genome, suggesting that these genomic regions harbour inversions governing local adaptation. Here, we utilize a new highly contiguous assembly of the honeybee genome to characterize these regions. Using whole-genome sequencing data from 55 highland and lowland bees, we find that the highland haplotypes at both regions are present at high frequencies in three independent highland populations but extremely rare elsewhere. The boundaries of both divergent regions are characterized by regions of high homology with each other positioned in opposite orientations and contain highly repetitive, long inverted repeats with homology to transposable elements. These regions are likely to represent inversion breakpoints that participate in nonallelic homologous recombination. Using long-read data, we confirm that the lowland samples are contiguous across breakpoint regions. We do not find evidence for disruption of functional sequence by these breakpoints, which suggests that the inversions are likely maintained due to their allelic content conferring local adaptation in highland environments. Finally, we identify a third divergent genomic region, which contains highly divergent segregating haplotypes that also may contain inversion variants under selection. The results add to a growing body of evidence indicating the importance of chromosomal inversions in local adaptation.
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- Jones, Julia C., et al.
(author)
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Extreme Differences in Recombination Rate between the Genomes of a Solitary and a Social Bee
- 2019
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In: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 36:10, s. 2277-2291
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Social insect genomes exhibit the highest rates of crossing over observed in plants and animals. The evolutionary causes of these extreme rates are unknown. Insight can be gained by comparing recombination rate variation across the genomes of related social and solitary insects. Here, we compare the genomic recombination landscape of the highly social honey bee, Apis mellifera, with the solitary alfalfa leafcutter bee, Megachile rotundata, by analyzing patterns of linkage disequilibrium in population-scale genome sequencing data. We infer that average recombination rates are extremely elevated in A. mellifera compared with M. rotundata. However, our results indicate that similar factors control the distribution of crossovers in the genomes of both species. Recombination rate is significantly reduced in coding regions in both species, with genes inferred to be germline methylated having particularly low rates. Genes with worker-biased patterns of expression in A. mellifera and their orthologs in M. rotundata have higher than average recombination rates in both species, suggesting that selection for higher diversity in genes involved in worker caste functions in social taxa is not the explanation for these elevated rates. Furthermore, we find no evidence that recombination has modulated the efficacy of selection among genes during bee evolution, which does not support the hypothesis that high recombination rates facilitated positive selection for new functions in social insects. Our results indicate that the evolution of sociality in insects likely entailed selection on modifiers that increased recombination rates genome wide, but that the genomic recombination landscape is determined by the same factors.
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