Ancient balancing selection at tan underlies female colour dimorphism in Drosophila erecta

Nature Communications
Amir YassinJohn E Pool

Abstract

Dimorphic traits are ubiquitous in nature, but the evolutionary factors leading to dimorphism are largely unclear. We investigate a potential case of sexual mimicry in Drosophila erecta, in which females show contrasting resemblance to males. We map the genetic basis of this sex-limited colour dimorphism to a region containing the gene tan. We find a striking signal of ancient balancing selection at the 'male-specific enhancer' of tan, with exceptionally high sequence divergence between light and dark alleles, suggesting that this dimorphism has been adaptively maintained for millions of years. Using transgenic reporter assays, we confirm that these enhancer alleles encode expression differences that are predicted to generate this pigmentation dimorphism. These results are compatible with the theoretical prediction that divergent phenotypes maintained by selection can evolve simple genetic architectures.

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Citations

Feb 9, 2017·Molecular Ecology·Violaine LlaurensMathieu Joron
Aug 7, 2017·Development Genes and Evolution·Jean-Michel Gibert
Jul 1, 2020·Molecular Ecology·Lisa L SramkoskiPatricia J Wittkopp
Aug 11, 2020·Biologie aujourd'hui·Jean-Michel Gibert
Apr 24, 2018·Trends in Genetics : TIG·Sarah A Signor, Sergey V Nuzhdin
Oct 19, 2021·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Benjamin R HarrisonDaniel E L Promislow

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Datasets Mentioned

BETA
SRP057255
KR811377
KR811457

Methods Mentioned

BETA
transgenic
dissection
PCR

Software Mentioned

DnaSP
R
Picard
MEGA
samtools
BWA

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