Published August 4, 2021 | Version v1
Journal article Open

A widely diverged locus involved in locomotor adaptation in Heliconius butterflies

Description

Heliconius butterflies have undergone adaptive radiation and therefore serve as an excellent system for exploring the continuum of speciation and adaptive evolution. However, there is a long-lasting paradox between their convergent mimetic wing patterns and rapid divergence in speciation. Here, we characterize a locus that consistently displays high divergence among Heliconius butterflies and acts as an introgression hotspot. We further show that this locus contains multiple genes related to locomotion and conserved in Lepidoptera. In light of these findings, we consider that locomotion traits may be under selection, and if these are heritable traits that are selected for, then they might act as species barriers.

Data availability

Sequence data are available from NCBI SRA: https://trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/sra/ (NCBI PRJEB12740, PRJNA73595, PRJEB1749, PRJEB8011, PRJNA324415, PRJNA308754, PRJEB21091, PRJNA471310, PRJEB11772, PRJNA577441, PRJEB2745, PRJNA552081, and PRJNA435610). All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.abh2340
Other
oai:uchicago.tind.io:10998

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China
31871271
National Natural Science Foundation of China
31725019
Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality
JQ19021

UChicago Information

Division(s)
Biological Sciences Division
Department(s)
Evolutionary Biology