Butterfly genome reveals promiscuous exchange of mimicry adaptations among species

By K. Dasmahapatra, James R. Walters, A. Briscoe, J. Davey, A. Whibley, Nicola J. Nadeau, Aleksey V. Zimin, D. Hughes, Laura C. Ferguson, Simon H. Martin and 70 more. Nature, 2012

1,158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The evolutionary importance of hybridization and introgression has long been debated. Hybrids are usually rare and unfit, but even infrequent hybridization can aid adaptation by transferring beneficial traits between species. Here we use genomic tools to investigate introgression in Heliconius, a rapidly radiating genus of neotropical butterflies widely used in studies of ecology, behaviour, mimicry and speciation. We sequenced the genome of Heliconius melpomene and compared it with other taxa to investigate chromosomal evolution in Lepidoptera and gene flow among multiple Heliconius species and races. Among 12,669 predicted genes, biologically important expansions of families of chemosensory and Hox genes are particularly noteworthy. Chromosomal organization has remained broadly conserved since the Cretaceous period, when butterflies split from the Bombyx (silkmoth) lineage. Using genomic resequencing, we show hybrid exchange of genes between three co-mimics, Heliconius melpomene, Heliconius timareta and Heliconius elevatus, especially at two genomic regions that control mimicry pattern. We infer that closely related Heliconius species exchange protective colour-pattern genes promiscuously, implying that hybridization has an important role in adaptive radiation.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29e597285623285a6ac94f7804fb9a7797abaa3e

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Citations in the corpus

Ancient Admixture in Human History (2012, methodology): “The D-statistic was also recently used as a convenient statistic for studying locus-specific introgression of genetic material controlling coloration in Heliconius butterflies (Dasmahapatra et al. 2012).”
Ecological Opportunity and Adaptive Radiation (2016, background): “516 Stroud · Losos Nosil 2012, Henning & Meyer 2014, Martin et al. 2015), and the number of putative cases of adaptive radiation via this mechanism of speciation remains low.”
A framework for incorporating evolutionary genomics into biodiversity conservation and management (2015, neutral): “butterflies [221].”
Genome-wide evidence for speciation with gene flow in Heliconius butterflies (2013, background): “Fortunately, genomic approaches are now beginning to allow us to address these long-standing questions from a different angle, by documenting the extent of admixture between species on a genome-wide scale (Kulathinal et al. 2009; Dasmahapatra et al. 2012; Ellegren et al. 2012; Garrigan et al. 2012; ”