Abstract
The columbine genus Aquilegia is a classic example of an adaptive radiation, involving a wide variety of pollinators and habitats. Here we present the genome assembly of A. coerulea 'Goldsmith', complemented by high-coverage sequencing data from 10 wild species covering the world-wide distribution. Our analyses reveal extensive allele sharing among species and demonstrate that introgression and selection played a role in the Aquilegia radiation. We also present the remarkable discovery that the evolutionary history of an entire chromosome differs from that of the rest of the genome - a phenomenon that we do not fully understand, but which highlights the need to consider chromosomes in an evolutionary context.
Highlights
Understanding adaptive radiation is a longstanding goal of evolutionary biology (Schluter, 2000)
With the aid of two genetic maps, we assembled these initial scaffolds into a 291.7 Mbp reference genome consisting of 7 chromosomes (282.6 Mbp) and an additional 1027 unplaced scaffolds (9.13 Mbp) (Supplementary file 3)
To annotate genes in the assembly, we used RNAseq data generated from a variety of tissues and Aquilegia species (Supplementary file 5), EST data sets (Kramer and Hodges, 2010), and protein homology support, yielding 30,023 loci and 13,527 alternate transcripts
Summary
Understanding adaptive radiation is a longstanding goal of evolutionary biology (Schluter, 2000). As a classic example of adaptive radiation, the Aquilegia genus has outstanding potential as a subject of such evolutionary studies (Hodges et al, 2004; Hodges and Derieg, 2009; Kramer, 2009). The genus is made up of about 70 species distributed across Asia, North America, and Europe (Munz, 1946) (Figure 1). Distributions of many Aquilegia species overlap or adjoin one another, sometimes forming notable hybrid zones (Grant, 1952; Hodges and Arnold, 1994b; Li et al, 2014). Phylogenetic studies have defined two concurrent, yet contrasting, adaptive radiations in Aquilegia (Bastida et al, 2010; Fior et al, 2013).
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