Biology Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-19-2015
Publication Title
PLoS Genetics
ISSN
1553-7390
Volume
10
Issue/No.
2 e1004892
First Page
1
Last Page
19
Abstract
Morphological variation in natural populations is a genomic test bed for studying the interface between molecular evolution and population genetics, but some of the most interesting questions involve non-model organisms that lack well annotated reference genomes. Many felid species exhibit polymorphism for melanism but the relative roles played by genetic drift, natural selection, and interspecies hybridization remain uncertain. We identify mutations of Agouti signaling protein (ASIP) or the Melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) as independent causes of melanism in three closely related South American species: the pampas cat (Leopardus colocolo), the kodkod (Leopardus guigna), and Geoffroy’s cat (Leopardus geoffroyi). To assess population level variation in the regions surrounding the causative mutations we apply genomic resources from the domestic cat to carry out clone-based capture and targeted resequencing of 299 kb and 251 kb segments that contain ASIP and MC1R, respectively, from 54 individuals (13–21 per species), achieving enrichment of ~500–2500-fold and ~150x coverage. Our analysis points to unique evolutionary histories for each of the three species, with a strong selective sweep in the pampas cat, a distinctive but short melanism-specific haplotype in the Geoffroy’s cat, and reduced nucleotide diversity for both ancestral and melanism-bearing chromosomes in the kodkod. These results reveal an important role for natural selection in a trait of longstanding interest to ecologists, geneticists, and the lay community, and provide a platform for comparative studies of morphological variation in other natural populations.
NSUWorks Citation
Schneider, Alexsandra; Corneliu Henegar; Kenneth Day; Devin Absher; Constanza Napolitano; Leandro Silveira; Victor A. David; Stephen J. O'Brien; Marilyn Menotti-Raymond; Gregory S. Barsh; and Eduardo Eizirik. 2015. "Recurrent Evolution of Melanism in South American Felids." PLoS Genetics 10, (2 e1004892): 1-19. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cnso_bio_facarticles/730
ORCID ID
0000-0001-7353-8301
ResearcherID
N-1726-2015
Comments
This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.