Population genomics of marine fishes: identifying adaptive variation in space and time

Studies of adaptive evolution have experienced a recent revival in population genetics of natural populations and there is currently much focus on identifying genomic signatures of selection in space and time. Insights into local adaptation, adaptive response to global change and evolutionary consequences of selective harvesting can be generated through population genomics studies, allowing the separation of the effects invoked by neutral processes (drift-migration) from those due to selection. Such knowledge is important not only for improving our basic understanding of natural as well as human-induced evolutionary processes, but also for predicting future trajectories of biodiversity and for setting conservation priorities. Marine fishes possess a number of features rendering them well suited for providing general insights into adaptive genomic evolution in natural populations. These include well-described population structures, substantial and rapidly developing genomic resources and abundant archived samples enabling temporal studies. Furthermore, superior possibilities for conducting large-scale experiments under controlled conditions, due to the economic resources provided by the large and growing aquaculture industry, hold great promise for utilizing recent technological developments. Here, we review achievements in marine fish genomics to date and highlight potential avenues for future research, which will provide both general insights into evolution in high gene flow species, as well as specific knowledge which can lead to improved management of marine organisms.     

Parallel Geographic Variation in Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster, an ancestrally African species, has recently spread throughout the world, associated with human activity. The species has served as the focus of many studies investigating local adaptation relating to latitudinal variation in non-African populations, especially those from the United States and Australia. These studies have documented the existence of shared, genetically determined phenotypic clines for several life history and morphological traits. However, there are no studies designed to formally address the degree of shared latitudinal differentiation at the genomic level. Here we present our comparative analysis of such differentiation. Not surprisingly, we find evidence of substantial, shared selection responses on the two continents, probably resulting from selection on standing ancestral variation. The polymorphic inversion In(3R)P has an important effect on this pattern, but considerable parallelism is also observed across the genome in regions not associated with inversion polymorphism. Interestingly, parallel latitudinal differentiation is observed even for variants that are not particularly strongly differentiated, which suggests that very large numbers of polymorphisms are targets of spatially varying selection in this species.     

Gene duplication as a mechanism of genomic adaptation to a changing environment

A subject of extensive study in evolutionary theory has been the issue of how neutral, redundant copies can be maintained in the genome for long periods of time. Concurrently, examples of adaptive gene duplications to various environmental conditions in different species have been described. At this point, it is too early to tell whether or not a substantial fraction of gene copies have initially achieved fixation by positive selection for increased dosage. Nevertheless, enough examples have accumulated in the literature that such a possibility should be considered. Here, I review the recent examples of adaptive gene duplications and make an attempt to draw generalizations on what types of genes may be particularly prone to be selected for under certain environmental conditions. The identification of copy-number variation in ecological field studies of species adapting to stressful or novel environmental conditions may improve our understanding of gene duplications as a mechanism of adaptation and its relevance to the long-term persistence of gene duplications.