A Single Amino Acid Mutation Contributes to Adaptive Beach Mouse Color Pattern
By H. Hoekstra, R. J. Hirschmann, R. Bundey, P. Insel, J. Crossland. Science, 2006
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Natural populations of beach mice exhibit a characteristic color pattern, relative to their mainland conspecifics, driven by natural selection for crypsis. We identified a derived, charge-changing amino acid mutation in the melanocortin-1 receptor (Mc1r) in beach mice, which decreases receptor function. In genetic crosses, allelic variation at Mc1r explains 9.8% to 36.4% of the variation in seven pigmentation traits determining color pattern. The derived Mc1r allele is present in Florida's Gulf Coast beach mice but not in Atlantic coast mice with similar light coloration, suggesting that different molecular mechanisms are responsible for convergent phenotypic evolution. Here, we link a single mutation in the coding region of a pigmentation gene to adaptive quantitative variation in the wild.
Subfields: Cell Biology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sensory Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5d61bc228b3c1951611ae7f03b20f6f2f516842
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Citations in the corpus
- THE BIOLOGY OF SPECIATION (2010, background): “In actuality, genetic drift is unlikely to result in substantial reproductive isolation for a variety of reasons (reviewed in Turelli et al. 2001; Coyne and Orr 2004).”
- Evolutionary Endocrinology: The Developing Synthesis between Endocrinology and Evolutionary Genetics (2007, background): “…1995a,b; Suzuki & Nijhout 2006); a spate of recent molecular studies investigated single-locus (or oligogenic) polymorphisms in natural populations of vertebrates (Colosimo et al. 2005, Hoekstra et al. 2006, Mundy et al. 2003, Nachman et al. 2003; all discussed below in Vertebrate Studies).”
- Restoring species through reintroductions: strategies for source population selection (2015, background): “…to produce individuals with similar phenotypes, either through selection on the same genes (e.g. Campbell & Bernatchez 2004; Turner et al. 2010; Schumer et al. 2011) or on different genes that produce similar phenotypes (e.g. Nachman et al. 2003; Campbell & Bernatchez 2004; Hoekstra et al. 2006).”
- Landscape Genomics: Understanding Relationships Between Environmental Heterogeneity and Genomic Characteristics of Populations (2017, background): “In a landscape genomics context, candidate genes have been statistically linked to habitat types (Hoekstra et al. 2006) and climate (Sork et al. 2016), and the framework will likely be used more often in future studies (see also Bragg et al. 2015).”
- Adaptive Radiation, Ecological Opportunity, and Evolutionary Determinism (2010, background): “…Gross et al. 2009; Chan et al. 2010; of course, this is not always the case: sometimes convergent phenotypic evolution is accomplished by different genetic changes, even in closely related species [e.g., Hoekstra and Nachman 2003; Wittkopp et al. 2003; Hoekstra et al. 2006; Kingsley et al. 2009]).”
- Combining population genomics and quantitative genetics: finding the genes underlying ecologically important traits (2008, background): “Do ecologically similar environments favor the same genes (Calboli et al., 2003; Colosimo et al., 2004, 2005; Protas et al., 2006), or is it possible to achieve a similar phenotype with different genetic mechanisms (Hoekstra and Nachman, 2003; Hoekstra et al., 2006)?”
- Genetic Polymorphism in Heterogeneous Environments: The Age of Genomics (2006, background): “Recently, Hoekstra et al. (2006) identified a single nucleotide mutation in Mc1r that is a major determinant of the derived light color in a recent (<6,000 years old) “beach mouse” subspecies of Peromyscus polionotus.”