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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.06.25.661303

Extreme long-range migration distorts flower colour clines in an Antirrhinum hybrid zone

Surendranadh, P.·Stankowski, S.·Field, D. L.·Barton, N. H.
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Abstract

Hybrid zones are natural laboratories for the study of speciation, allowing researchers to quantify selection, dispersal, and barriers to gene flow in the real world. We analyzed a flower-colour hybrid zone between two varieties of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus subspecies majus, based on a dataset of 22,494 individuals sampled over 10 consecutive years (Field et al. in prep). We found narrow geographic clines at six SNP markers that are tightly linked to known flower colour loci, with widths ranging from 0.8 to 5.5 km. The clines have a stepped shape, which is expected when strong linkage disequilibrium generated by diffusive dispersal into the hybrid zone, increases the effective selection at the cline centre. However, the observed LD (mean [Formula]) was far too weak to explain the stepped cline shapes. Instead, we show that the stepped clines are shaped primarily by the observed long-distance dispersal. We used a novel simulation framework that accounts for realistic dispersal and multilocus selection to estimate the direct selection (1.5% to 18.5%) and indirect selection due to LD (1.2% to 2.4%) on each colour locus. Finally, we show that the barrier to the flow of neutral alleles through diffusive dispersal causes negligible distortion to the clines, while the reduction in gene flow due to selection on long-range migrants is substantial ([~]50%). The results shed new light onto the processes that shape hybrid zones, and highlight the need to account for the effects of realistic dispersal in theoretical and empirical studies of hybrid zones.

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Surendranadh, P., Stankowski, S., Field, D. L., Barton, N. H.. 2025-06-27. Extreme long-range migration distorts flower colour clines in an Antirrhinum hybrid zone. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.25.661303

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