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Arms races with mitochondrial genome soft sweeps in a gynodioecious plant, Plantago lanceolata

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Nicholas Levsen, Dr Kirsten Wolff

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2019.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.


Abstract

Biological situations involving conflict can create arms race situations with repeated fixations of different functional variants, producing selective sweeps and lowering neutral diversity in genome regions linked to the functional locus. However, they can sometimes lead to balancing selection, potentially creating long coalescent times for sites with functionally different variants, and, if recombination occurs rarely, for extended haplotypes carrying such variants. We tested between these possibilities in a gynodioecious plant, Plantago lanceolata, in which cytoplasmic male-sterility factors conflict with nuclear restorers of male fertility. We find low mitochondrial diversity, which does not support very long-term coexistence of highly diverged mitochondrial haplotypes. Interestingly, however, we found a derived haplotype that is associated with male fertility in a restricted geographic region, and that has fixed differences from the ancestral sequence in several genes, suggesting that it did not arise very recently. Taken together, the results suggest arms race events that involved “soft" selective sweeps involving a moderately old-established haplotype, consistent with the frequency fluctuations predicted by theoretical models of gynodioecy.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Bergero R, Levsen N, Wolff K, Charlesworth D

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Molecular Ecology

Year: 2019

Volume: 28

Issue: 11

Pages: 2772-2785

Print publication date: 01/06/2019

Online publication date: 17/05/2019

Acceptance date: 23/04/2019

Date deposited: 07/05/2019

ISSN (print): 0962-1083

ISSN (electronic): 1365-294X

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd

URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15121

DOI: 10.1111/mec.15121

Notes: Research data available at: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.th757vg


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
NE/J011444/1Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)

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