Rincon-Sandoval, Melissa, De-Kayne, Rishi, Shank, Stephen D., Pirro, Stacy, Ko’ou, Alfred, Abueg, Linelle, Tracey, Alan, Mountcastle, Jackie, O’Toole, Brian, Balacco, Jennifer, Formenti, Giulio, Jarvis, Erich D., Arcila, Dahiana, Kosakovsky Pond, Sergei L., Davis, Aaron, Bloom, Devin D.., and Betancur-R, Ricardo (2024) Ecological diversification of sea catfishes is accompanied by genome-wide signatures of positive selection. Nature Communications, 15. 10040.

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Abstract

Habitat transitions have shaped the evolutionary trajectory of many clades. Sea catfishes (Ariidae) have repeatedly undergone ecological transitions, including colonizing freshwaters from marine environments, leading to an adaptive radiation in Australia and New Guinea alongside non-radiating freshwater lineages elsewhere. Here, we generate and analyze one long-read reference genome and 66 short-read whole genome assemblies, in conjunction with genomic data for 54 additional species. We investigate how three major ecological transitions have shaped genomic variation among ariids over their ~ 50 million-year evolutionary history. Our results show that relatively younger freshwater lineages exhibit a higher incidence of positive selection than their more ancient marine counterparts. They also display a larger disparity in body shapes, a trend that correlates with a heightened occurrence of positive selection on genes associated with body size and elongation. Although positive selection in the Australia and New Guinea radiation does not stand out compared to non-radiating lineages overall, selection across the prolactin gene family during the marine-to-freshwater transition suggests that strong osmoregulatory adaptations may have facilitated their colonization and radiation. Our findings underscore the significant role of selection in shaping the genome and organismal traits in response to habitat shifts across macroevolutionary scales.

Item ID:	85181
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2041-1723
Copyright Information:	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2025 03:16
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3105 Genetics > 310509 Genomics @ 50% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 50%
SEO Codes:	28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280102 Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences @ 100%
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