Ancient introgression drives adaptation to cooler and drier mountain habitats in a cypress species complex
Abstract
Introgression may act as an important source of new genetic variation to facilitate the adaptation of organisms to new environments, yet how introgression might enable tree species to adapt to higher latitudes and elevations remains unclear. Applying whole-transcriptome sequencing and population genetic analyses, we present an example of ancient introgression from a cypress species (Cupressus gigantea) that occurs at higher latitude and elevation on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau into a related species (C. duclouxiana), which has likely aided the latter species to extend its range by colonizing cooler and drier mountain habitats during postglacial periods. We show that 16 introgressed candidate adaptive loci could have played pivotal roles in response to diverse stresses experienced in a high-elevation environment. Our findings provide new insights into the evolutionary history of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau plants and the importance of introgression in the adaptation of species to climate change.
Citation
Ma , Y , Wang , J , Hu , Q , Li , J , Sun , Y , Zhang , L , Abbott , R J , Liu , J & Mao , K 2019 , ' Ancient introgression drives adaptation to cooler and drier mountain habitats in a cypress species complex ' , Communications Biology , vol. 2 , 213 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0445-z
Publication
Communications Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 31590821, 31622015, 31370261), the National Basic Research Program of China (grant number 2014CB954100), Sichuan Provincial Department of Science and Technology (grant number 2015JQ0018) and Sichuan University (Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, SCU2019D013, SCU 2018D006)Collections
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