AI Article Synopsis

  • Unraveling the genetic basis of adaptive traits is challenging for evolutionary biology, but crucial for understanding evolution and the genetic architecture influencing traits.
  • This study focuses on Heliconius butterflies, specifically Heliconius melpomene, and identifies genetic loci responsible for specific wing coloration and patterns, particularly the broken band phenotype and the red-orange pigmentation on forewings.
  • The research highlights the pleiotropic nature of wing-patterning genes, showing that these genetic factors can simultaneously influence multiple traits, thereby shaping and constraining adaptive evolution.

Article Abstract

Unravelling the genetic basis of adaptive traits is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Doing so informs our understanding of evolution towards an adaptive optimum, the distribution of locus effect sizes, and the influence of genetic architecture on the evolvability of a trait. In the Müllerian co-mimics Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius erato some Mendelian loci affecting mimicry shifts are well known. However, several phenotypes in H. melpomene remain to be mapped, and the quantitative genetics of colour pattern variation has rarely been analysed. Here we use quantitative trait loci (QTL) analyses of crosses between H. melpomene races from Peru and Suriname to map, for the first time, the control of the broken band phenotype to WntA and identify a ~100 kb region controlling this variation. Additionally, we map variation in basal forewing red-orange pigmentation to a locus centred around the gene ventral veins lacking (vvl). The locus also appears to affect medial band shape variation as it was previously known to do in H. erato. This adds to the list of homologous regions controlling convergent phenotypes between these two species. Finally we show that Heliconius wing-patterning genes are strikingly pleiotropic among wing pattern traits. Our results demonstrate how genetic architecture can shape, aid and constrain adaptive evolution.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6781118PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41437-018-0180-0DOI Listing

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