Journal
PLOS BIOLOGY
Volume 17, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000244
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- London NERC DTP studentship (Natural Environment Research Council) [NE/L002485/1]
- UCL IMPACT PhD studentship
- European Research Council [280632]
- Royal Society University Research Fellowship
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/G0189452/1]
- NERC [NE/G019452/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The evolution of sexual dimorphism is constrained by a shared genome, leading to 'sexual antagonism', in which different alleles at given loci are favoured by selection in males and females. Despite its wide taxonomic incidence, we know little about the identity, genomic location, and evolutionary dynamics of antagonistic genetic variants. To address these deficits, we use sex-specific fitness data from 202 fully sequenced hemiclonal Drosophila melanogaster fly lines to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of sexual antagonism. We identify approximately 230 chromosomal clusters of candidate antagonistic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In contradiction to classic theory, we find no clear evidence that the X chromosome is a hot spot for sexually antagonistic variation. Characterising antagonistic SNPs functionally, we find a large excess of missense variants but little enrichment in terms of gene function. We also assess the evolutionary persistence of antagonistic variants by examining extant polymorphism in wild D. melanogaster populations and closely related species. Remarkably, antagonistic variants are associated with multiple signatures of balancing selection across the D. melanogaster distribution range and in their sister species D. simulans, indicating widespread and evolutionarily persistent (about 1 million years) genomic constraints on the evolution of sexual dimorphism. Based on our results, we propose that antagonistic variation accumulates because of constraints on the resolution of sexual conflict over protein coding sequences, thus contributing to the long-term maintenance of heritable fitness variation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available