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Wing shape and environmental energy (1 Viewer)

Fred Ruhe

Well-known member
Netherlands
David A. Duchene, Paola A Valencia & Daniel A. Cadena, 2020

Wing shape and environmental energy are associated with molecular evolutionary rates in a large avian radiation.

bioRxiv 2020.01.16.908368 (preprint)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.16.908368
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.16.908368v1

Abstract:

Among the macroevolutionary drivers of molecular evolutionary rates, metabolic demands and environmental energy have been a central topic of discussion. The large number of studies examining these associations have found mixed results, and have rarely explored the interactions among various factors impacting molecular evolutionary rates. Taking the diverse avian family Furnariidae as a case study, we examined the association between several estimates of molecular evolutionary rates with a proxy of metabolic demands imposed by flight (wing morphology) and proxies of environmental energy across the geographic ranges of species (temperature and UV radiation). We found a strong positive association between molecular rates in genomic regions that can change the coded amino-acid with wing morphology, environmental temperature, and UV radiation. Strikingly, however, we did not find evidence of such associations with molecular rates at sites not impacting amino-acids. Our results suggest that the demands of flight and environmental energy primarily impact genome evolution by placing selective constraints, instead of being associated with basal mutation rates.

Enjoy,

Fred
 
Figure 1. The association between mitochondrial molecular rates at the 1st and 2nd codon positions and hand-wing index across species of the avian family Furnariidae. Warmer colours indicate species with greater body mass. The predicted regression line is added for the mean body mass (orange), and each of the body masses one standard deviation from the mean (red and yellow). Molecular rates are shown under a box-cox t 244 ransformation; results with other transformations are qualitatively identical.

Fred
 

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