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Showing posts from September, 2016

New paper: Linkage of adaptive traits

We studied the genomic organisation of ecologically relevant traits in Midas cichlids. Fruciano, Carmelo, Paolo Franchini, Viera Kovacova,  Kathryn R. Elmer , Frederico Henning & Axel Meyer. 2016.  Genetic linkage of distinct adaptive traits in sympatrically speciating crater lake cichlid fish.  Nature Communications 7, Article number: 12736 (2016) doi:10.1038/ncomms12736 Abstract Our understanding of how biological diversity arises is limited, especially in the case of  speciation in the face of gene flow. Here we investigate the genomic basis of adaptive traits,  focusing on a sympatrically diverging species pair of crater lake cichlid fishes. We identify the  main quantitative trait loci (QTL) for two eco-morphological traits: body shape and pharyngeal  jaw morphology. These traits diverge in parallel between benthic and limnetic species  in the repeated adaptive radiations of this and other fish lineages. Remarkably, a single  chromosomal region contains the highest