MBE Advance Access first published online on September 8, 2006
This version published online on September 15, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl110
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1 Québec Océan, Département de Biologie, Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada, G1K 7P4
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Species living in comparable habitats often display strikingly similar patterns of specialization, suggesting that natural selection can lead to predictable evolutionary changes. Elucidating the genomic basis underlying such adaptive phenotypic changes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Increasing evidence indicates that natural selection would first modulate gene regulation during the process of population divergence. Previously, we showed that parallel phenotypic adaptations of the dwarf whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) ecotype to the limnetic trophic niche involved parallel transcriptional changes at the same genes involved in mucle contraction and energetic metabolism relative to the sympatric normal ecotype. Here, we tested whether the same genes are also implicated in a limnetic specialist species, the cisco (C. artedi), which is the most likely competitor of dwarf whitefish. Significant up-regulation was detected in cisco at the same six candidate genes functionally involved in modulating swimming activity, namely five variants of a major protein of fast muscle and one putative catalytic crystallin enzyme. Moreover, three of five variants and the same putative catalytic crystallin enzyme were up-regulated in cisco relative to the dwarf ecotype, indicating a greater physiological potential of the former for exploiting the limnetic trophic niche. This study provides the first empirical evidence that recent, parallel phenotypic evolution towards the use of the same ecological niche occupied by a specialist competitor involved similar adaptive changes in expression at the same genes. As such, this study provides strong support to the general hypothesis directional selection acting on gene regulation may promote rapid phenotypic divergence, and ultimately speciation. The tables and figures have been inserted.
Accepted September 1, 2006
Research Article
The Transcriptomics of Ecological Convergence Between two Limnetic Coregonine Fishes (Salmonidae)
N. Derome 1 * and L. Bernatchez 1
N. Derome, E-mail: nicolas.derome{at}giroq.ulaval.ca
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