TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dal Grande, Francesco
A1  - Sharma, Rahul
A1  - Meiser, Anjuli
A1  - Rolshausen, Gregor
A1  - Büdel, Burkhard
A1  - Mishra, Bagdevi
A1  - Thines, Marco
A1  - Otte, Jürgen
A1  - Pfenninger, Markus
A1  - Schmitt, Imke
T1  - Adaptive differentiation coincides with local bioclimatic conditions along an elevational cline in populations of a lichen-forming fungus
T2  - BMC evolutionary biology
N2  - Background: Many fungal species occur across a variety of habitats. Particularly lichens, fungi forming symbioses with photosynthetic partners, have evolved remarkable tolerances for environmental extremes. Despite their ecological importance and ubiquity, little is known about the genetic basis of adaption in lichen populations. Here we studied patterns of genome-wide differentiation in the lichen-forming fungus Lasallia pustulata along an altitudinal gradient in the Mediterranean region. We resequenced six populations as pools and identified highly differentiated genomic regions. We then detected gene-environment correlations while controlling for shared population history and pooled sequencing bias, and performed ecophysiological experiments to assess fitness differences of individuals from different environments.
Results: We detected two strongly differentiated genetic clusters linked to Mediterranean and temperate-oceanic climate, and an admixture zone, which coincided with the transition between the two bioclimates. High altitude individuals showed ecophysiological adaptations to wetter and more shaded conditions. Highly differentiated genome regions contained a number of genes associated with stress response, local environmental adaptation, and sexual reproduction.
Conclusions: Taken together our results provide evidence for a complex interplay between demographic history and spatially varying selection acting on a number of key biological processes, suggesting a scenario of ecological speciation.
KW  - Adaptation
KW  - Altitudinal
KW  - Climate change
KW  - Fungi
KW  - Pool-Seq
KW  - Population genomics
KW  - Symbiosis
KW  - SNP
KW  - Gradient
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/43725
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-437255
SN  - 1471-2148
N1  - © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided 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 Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
VL  - 17
IS  - 1, Art. 93
SP  - 1
EP  - 14
PB  - BioMed Central ; Springer
CY  - London ; Berlin ; Heidelberg
ER  -