Biology subjects

Stetter, M. G.

Publications and source records attributed to Stetter, M. G..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Genetic architecture and selective sweeps after polygenic adaptation to distant trait optima

Understanding the genetic basis of phenotypic adaptation to changing environments is an essential goal of population and quantitative genetics. While technological advances now allow interrogation of genome-wide genotyping data in large panels, our understanding of the process of polygenic adaptation is still limited. To address this limitation, we use extensive forward-time simulation to explore the impacts of variation in demography, trait genetics, and selection on the rate and mode of adaptation and the resulting genetic architecture. We simulate a population adapting to an optimum shift, modeling sequence variation for 20 QTL for each of 12 different demographies for 100 different traits varying in the effect size distribution of new mutations, the strength of stabilizing selection, and the contribution of the genomic background. We then use random forest regression approaches to learn the relative importance of input parameters in determining a number of aspects of the process of adaptation including the speed of adaptation, the relative frequency of hard sweeps and sweeps from standing variation, or the final genetic architecture of the trait. We find that selective sweeps occur even for traits under relatively weak selection and where the genetic background explains most of the variation. Though most sweeps occur from variation segregating in the ancestral population, new mutations can be important for traits under strong stabilizing selection that undergo a large optimum shift. We also show that population bottlenecks and expansion impact overall genetic variation as well as the relative importance of sweeps from standing variation and the speed with which adaptation can occur. We then compare our results to two traits under selection during maize domestication, showing that our simulations qualitatively recapitulate differences between them. Overall, our results underscore the complex population genetics of individual loci in even relatively simple quantitative trait models, but provide a glimpse into the factors that drive this complexity and the potential of these approaches for understanding polygenic adaptation.\n\nAuthor summaryMany traits are controlled by a large number of genes, and environmental changes can lead to shifts in trait optima. How populations adapt to these shifts depends on a number of parameters including the genetic basis of the trait as well as population demography. We simulate a number of trait architectures and population histories to study the genetics of adaptation to distant trait optima. We find that selective sweeps occur even in traits under relatively weak selection and our machine learning analyses find that demography and the effect sizes of mutations have the largest influence on genetic variation after adaptation. Maize domestication is a well suited model for trait adaptation accompanied by demographic changes. We show how two example traits under a maize specific demography adapt to a distant optimum and demonstrate that polygenic adaptation is a well suited model for crop domestication even for traits with major effect loci.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Adaptation in plant genomes: bigger isn’t better, but it’s probably different

Here we have proposed the functional space hypothesis, positing that mutational target size scales with genome size, impacting the number, source, and genomic location of beneficial mutations that contribute to adaptation. Though motivated by preliminary evidence, mostly from Arabidopsis and maize, more data are needed before any rigorous assessment of the hypothesis can be made. If correct, the functional space hypothesis suggests that we should expect plants with large genomes to exhibit more functional mutations outside of genes, more regulatory variation, and likely less signal of strong selective sweeps reducing diversity. These differences have implications for how we study the evolution and development of plant genomes, from where we should look for signals of adaptation to what patterns we expect adaptation to leave in genetic diversity or gene expression data. While flowering plant genomes vary across more than three orders of magnitude in size, most studies of both functional and evolutionary genomics have focused on species at the extreme small edge of this scale. Our hypothesis predicts that methods and results from these small genomes may not replicate well as we begin to explore large plant genomes. Finally, while we have focused here on evidence from plant genomes, we see no a priori reason why similar arguments might not hold in other taxa as well.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2016

Phylogenetic relationships and genome size evolution within the genus Amaranthus indicate the ancestors of an ancient crop

The genus Amaranthus consists of 50 to 70 species and harbors several cultivated and weedy species of great economic importance. A small number of suitable traits, phenotypic plasticity, gene flow and hybridization made it difficult to establish the taxonomy and phylogeny of the whole genus despite various studies using molecular markers. We inferred the phylogeny of the Amaranthus genus using genotyping by sequencing (GBS) of 94 genebank accessions representing 35 Amaranthus species and measured their genome sizes. SNPs were called by de novo and reference-based methods, for which we used the distant sugarbeet Beta vulgaris and the closely related Amaranthus hypochondriacus as references. SNP counts and proportions of missing data differed between methods, but the resulting phylogenetic trees were highly similar. A distance-based neighbor joing tree of individual accessions and a species tree calculated with the multispecies coalescent supported a previous taxonomic classification into three subgenera although the subgenus A. Acnida consists of two highly differentiated clades. The analysis of the Hybridus complex within the A. Amaranthus subgenus revealed insights on the history of cultivated grain amaranths. The complex includes the three cultivated grain amaranths and their wild relatives and was well separated from other species in the subgenus. Wild and cultivated amaranth accessions did not differentiate according to the species assignment but clustered by their geographic origin from South and Central America. Different geographically separated populations of Amaranthus hybridus appear to be the common ancestors of the three cultivated grain species and A. quitensis might be additionally be involved in the evolution of South American grain amaranth (A. caudatus). We also measured genome sizes of the species and observed little variation with the exception of two lineages that showed evidence for a recent polyploidization. With the exception of two lineages, genome sizes are quite similar and indicate that polyploidization did not play a major role in the history of the genus.

evolutionary biology↗