24 Oral - Platform Session #2 Genetics of Adaptation
Wednesday June 08, 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Authors:
Tom Booker ¹; Pooja Singh ²; Brandon Lind ¹; Mengmeng Lu ²; Sally Aitken ¹; Michael Whitlock ¹; Sam Yeaman ²

Affiliations:
1) University of British Columbia; 2) University of Calgary

Keywords:
Natural selection

Studying local adaptation provides a window into the process of evolution, yielding insights about the nature of evolvability. Conifers are a great model for studying convergent evolution as they often inhabit large spatial ranges that encompass wide environmental heterogeneity to which they exhibit strong local adaptation. If the same or similar genomic regions were repeatedly involved in local adaptation in distinct conifer lineages, it would inform us about constraints to diversification. A potentially powerful method to identify locally adaptive genetic variation is the genotype environmental association (GEA) study. In GEA studies, correlations between allele frequency and environmental variables that are presumed to reflect selection gradients are examined for many markers across the genome. In this presentation, I will describe a comparative population genomics analysis of conifers from both North America and Europe. In our study, we apply novel GEA methods and tests for convergent evolution to data from 7 species, representing roughly 200 million years of evolution. Our novel methods allow us to quantify the extent of convergent evolution among pairs of species and to identify gene orthologs with evidence of convergent evolution over deep time. I will describe results from our analyses and discuss what we can infer from them.