Back

How weedy Arabidopsis thaliana dominated the world: ancestral variation and polygenic adaptation

Lo, C.-Y.; Chien, C.-C.; Lin, Y.-P.; Yeh, P.-M.; Lee, C.-R.

2024-04-30 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2024.04.28.591542 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The composition of a species could change with demographic turnovers, where dominant populations quickly expanded and replaced others. However, whether such events have a genetic basis remains to be investigated. Previous studies showed that Arabidopsis thaliana experienced a significant demographic turnover, where "non-relicts" replaced "relicts" throughout Eurasia. Here, we showed that non-relicts have smaller seeds, more seeds per fruit, and a higher germination rate, making them more competitive over relicts. Using a unique population enriching relict alleles while minimizing population structure, we identified candidate loci and showed that such trait divergence was caused by the divergent sorting of multiple ancient haplotypes in a Mendelian gene and joint allele frequency change of polygenes affecting single-trait divergence and multi-trait covariance. This study is one of the few genetic investigations of species-wide demographic turnover, emphasizing the importance of processes different from the much-focused hard selective sweep.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.