Continental-Scale Footprint of Balancing and Positive Selection in a Small Rodent (Microtus arvalis) ...

• Main Authors: Fischer, Martin, Foll, Matthieu, Heckel, Gerald, Excoffier, Laurent
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science 2014
• Subjects: 570 Life sciences; biology; Common vole; Microtus arvalis
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7892/boris.71385; https://boris.unibe.ch/71385/

Genetic adaptation to different environmental conditions is expected to lead to large differences between populations at selected loci, thus providing a signature of positive selection. Whereas balancing selection can maintain polymorphisms over long evolutionary periods and even geographic scale, thus leads to low levels of divergence between populations at selected loci. However, little is known about the relative importance of these two selective forces in shaping genomic diversity, partly due to difficulties in recognizing balancing selection in species showing low levels of differentiation. Here we address this problem by studying genomic diversity in the European common vole (Microtus arvalis) presenting high levels of differentiation between populations (average FST = 0.31). We studied 3,839 Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) markers genotyped in 444 individuals from 21 populations distributed across the European continent and hence over different environmental conditions. Our statistical ...