Mashoodh, Rahia;
Trowsdale, Angela T;
Manica, Andrea;
Kilner, Rebecca M;
(2023)
Parental care shapes the evolution of molecular genetic variation.
Evolution Letters
, Article qrad039. 10.1093/evlett/qrad039.
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Abstract
Cooperative social behaviors, such as parental care, have long been hypothesized to relax selection leading to the accumulation of genetic variation in populations. Although the idea has been discussed for decades, there has been relatively little experimental work to investigate how social behavior contributes to genetic variation in populations. Here, we investigate how parental care can shape molecular genetic variation in the subsocial insect, Nicrophorus vespilloides. Using whole-genome sequencing of populations that had evolved in the presence or absence of parental care for 30 generations, we show that parental care maintains levels of standing genetic variation. In contrast, under a harsh environment without care, strong directional selection caused a reduction in genetic variation. Furthermore, we show that adaptation to the loss of care is associated with genetic divergence between populations at loci related to stress, morphological development, and transcriptional regulation. These data reveal how social behavior is linked to the genetic processes that shape and maintain genetic diversity within populations, and provides rare empirical evidence for an old hypothesis.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Parental care shapes the evolution of molecular genetic variation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/evlett/qrad039 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrad039 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEN). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | parental care, genetic variation, adaptation, mutation load, population genetics, social evolution |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177779 |
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