NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Evolution
NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Evolution. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 April 01. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptPublished NIH-PA Author Manuscript in final edited NIH-PA Author Manuscript form as: Evolution. 2013 April ; 67(4): 1155–1168. doi:10.1111/evo.12009. An evaluation of the hybrid speciation hypothesis for Xiphophorus clemenciae based on whole genome sequences Molly Schumer1, Rongfeng Cui3,4, Bastien Boussau5,6, Ronald Walter7, Gil Rosenthal3,4, and Peter Andolfatto1,2 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA 2Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA 3Department of Biology, Texas A&M University, TAMU, College Station, TX, USA 4Centro de Investigaciones Científicas de las Huastecas Aguazarca, Calnali, Hidalgo, Mexico 5Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA 6Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive, Université de Lyon, Lyon, France 7Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX 78666 Abstract Once thought rare in animal taxa, hybridization has been increasingly recognized as an important and common force in animal evolution. In the past decade, a number of studies have suggested that hybridization has driven speciation in some animal groups. We investigate the signature of hybridization in the genome of a putative hybrid species, Xiphophorus clemenciae, through whole genome sequencing of this species and its hypothesized progenitors. Based on analysis of this data, we find that X. clemenciae is unlikely to have been derived from admixture between its proposed parental species. However, we find significant evidence for recent gene flow between Xiphophorus species. Though we detect genetic exchange in two pairs of species analyzed, the proportion of genomic regions that can be attributed to hybrid origin is small, suggesting that strong behavioral pre-mating isolation prevents frequent hybridization in Xiphophorus.
[Show full text]