From tides to nucleotides: Genomic signatures of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity in barnacles

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  • Joaquin C. B. Nunez
  • Stephen Rong
  • David A. Ferranti
  • Alejandro Damian-Serrano
  • Kimberly B. Neil
  • Glenner, Henrik
  • Rebecca G. Elyanow
  • Bianca R. P. Brown
  • Magnus Alm Rosenblad
  • Anders Blomberg
  • Kerstin Johannesson
  • David M. Rand

The northern acorn barnacle (Semibalanus balanoides) is a robust system to study the genetic basis of adaptations to highly heterogeneous environments. Adult barnacles may be exposed to highly dissimilar levels of thermal stress depending on where they settle in the intertidal (i.e., closer to the upper or lower tidal boundary). For instance, barnacles near the upper tidal limit experience episodic summer temperatures above recorded heat coma levels. This differential stress at the microhabitat level is also dependent on the aspect of sun exposure. In the present study, we used pool-seq approaches to conduct a genome wide screen for loci responding to intertidal zonation across the North Atlantic basin (Maine, Rhode Island, and Norway). Our analysis discovered 382 genomic regions containing SNPs which are consistently zonated (i.e., SNPs whose frequencies vary depending on their position in the rocky intertidal) across all surveyed habitats. Notably, most zonated SNPs are young and private to the North Atlantic. These regions show high levels of genetic differentiation across ecologically extreme microhabitats concomitant with elevated levels of genetic variation and Tajima's D, suggesting the action of non-neutral processes. Overall, these findings support the hypothesis that spatially heterogeneous selection is a general and repeatable feature for this species, and that natural selection can maintain functional genetic variation in heterogeneous environments.

Original languageEnglish
JournalMolecular Ecology
Volume30
Issue number23
Pages (from-to)6417-6433
Number of pages17
ISSN0962-1083
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Molecular Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

    Research areas

  • balancing selection, barnacles, ecological genomics, ecological load, intertidal, Semibalanus balanoides, zonation

ID: 276160464