Abstract
Environmental conditions are strong selective forces, which may influence adaptation and speciation. The wild tomato species Solanum chilense, native to South America, is exposed to a range of abiotic stress factors. To identify signatures of natural selection and local adaptation, we analysed 16 genes involved in the abiotic stress response and compared the results to a set of reference genes in 23 populations across the entire species range. The abiotic stress-responsive genes are characterized by elevated nonsynonymous nucleotide diversity and divergence. We detected signatures of positive selection in several abiotic stress-responsive genes on both the population and species levels. Local adaptation to abiotic stresses is particularly apparent at the boundary of the species distribution in populations from coastal low-altitude and mountainous high-altitude regions.
Highlights
IntroductionAbiotic environmental conditions contribute to the geographical distribution of these species [3]
We find an excess of nonsynonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and divergence in the abiotic stressresponsive genes in comparison to the reference genes
We focused on a set of 16 abiotic stress-responsive genes
Summary
Abiotic environmental conditions contribute to the geographical distribution of these species [3]. Many wild tomato species show distinct morphological adaptations to their natural habitat [2,3]. S. chilense, the wild tomato species that can grow under the driest and coldest conditions [2], is characterized by a deep root system that may allow the utilization of deep groundwater, enhancing drought tolerance [2,3]. Abiotic stress response genes and pathways have been studied extensively in Arabidopsis and rice [4,5]. Receptor or sensory genes receive the stress signal and forward it to
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