Recurrent Evolution of Melanism in South American Felids

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004892
• Publication Date: 2015-02-19T18:46:37Z
• Authors: Alexsandra Schneider; Corneliu Henegar; Kenneth Day; Devin Absher; Constanza Napolitano; Leandro Silveira; Victor A. David; Stephen J. O’Brien; Marilyn Menotti-R...; Gregory S. Barsh; Eduardo Eizirik
• Keywords: Melanism; Balancing selection; Population genomics

Morphological variation in natural populations is a genomic test bed for studying the interface between molecular evolution and population genetics, but some of most interesting questions involve non-model organisms that lack well annotated reference genomes. Many felid species exhibit polymorphism melanism relative roles played by genetic drift, selection, interspecies hybridization remain uncertain. We identify mutations Agouti signaling protein (ASIP) or Melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) as independent causes three closely related South American species: pampas cat (Leopardus colocolo), kodkod guigna), Geoffroy's geoffroyi). To assess level regions surrounding causative we apply resources from domestic to carry out clone-based capture targeted resequencing 299 kb 251 segments contain ASIP MC1R, respectively, 54 individuals (13-21 per species), achieving enrichment ~500-2500-fold ~150x coverage. Our analysis points unique evolutionary histories each species, with strong selective sweep cat, distinctive short melanism-specific haplotype reduced nucleotide diversity both ancestral melanism-bearing chromosomes kodkod. These results reveal an important role selection trait longstanding interest ecologists, geneticists, lay community, provide platform comparative studies morphological other populations.