[COLLOQUE] GENTREE Final Conference 27-31 January 2020 séance 4

GENTREE Final Conference : Tanja PYHÄJÄRVI - University of Oulu · Finland 

GENTREE Final Conference 'Genetics to the rescue - managing forests sustainably in a changing environment' 

27-31 January 2020, Avignon, France

http://www.gentree-h2020.eu/

Tanja PYHÄJÄRVI - University of Oulu · Finland : Genomics ofclinal local adaptation in Pinus sylvestris under continuousenvironmental and spatial genetic setting

Understanding the consequences of local adaptation at the genomicdiversity is a central goal in evolutionary genetics of naturalpopulations.

In species with large continuous geographicaldistributions the phenotypic signal of local adaptation is frequentlyclear, but the genetic background often remains elusive.

We examinedthe patterns of genetic diversity in Pinus sylvestris, a keystonespecies in many Eurasian ecosystems with a huge distribution rangeand decades of forestry research showing that it is locally adaptedto the vast range of environmental conditions. Making P. sylvestrisan even more attractive subject of local adaptation study, populationstructure has been shown to be weak previously and in this study. 

However, little is known about the molecular genetic basis ofadaptation, as the massive size of gymnosperm genomes has preventedlarge scale genomic surveys.

We generated a both geographically andgenomically extensive dataset using a targeted sequencing approach.By applying divergence-based and landscape genomics methods we foundthat several coding loci contribute to local adaptation.

We alsodiscovered a very large (ca. 300 Mbp) putative inversion with asignal of local adaptation, which to our knowledge is the first suchdiscovery in conifers.

Our results call for more detailed analysis ofstructural variation in relation to genomic basis of localadaptation, emphasize the lack of large effect loci contributing tolocal adaptation in the coding regions and thus point out to the needfor more attention towards multi-locus analysis of polygenicadaptation.