scholarly journals The evolutionary history of Nebraska deer mice: local adaptation in the face of strong gene flow

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne P. Pfeifer ◽  
Stefan Laurent ◽  
Vitor C. Sousa ◽  
Catherine R. Linnen ◽  
Matthieu Foll ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThe interplay of gene flow, genetic drift, and local selective pressure is a dynamic process that has been well studied from a theoretical perspective over the last century. Wright and Haldane laid the foundation for expectations under an island-continent model, demonstrating that an island-specific beneficial allele may be maintained locally if the selection coefficient is larger than the rate of migration of the ancestral allele from the continent. Subsequent extensions of this model have provided considerably more insight. Yet, connecting theoretical results with empirical data has proven challenging, owing to a lack of information on the relationship between genotype, phenotype, and fitness. Here, we examine the demographic and selective history of deer mice in and around the Nebraska Sand Hills, a system in which variation at the Agouti locus affects cryptic coloration that in turn affects the survival of mice in their local habitat. We first genotyped 250 individuals from eleven sites along a transect spanning the Sand Hills at 660,000 SNPs across the genome. Using these genomic data, we found that deer mice first colonized the Sand Hills following the last glacial period. Subsequent high rates of gene flow have served to homogenize the majority of the genome between populations on and off the Sand Hills, with the exception of the Agouti pigmentation locus. Furthermore, mutations at this locus are strongly associated with the pigment traits that are strongly correlated with local soil coloration and thus responsible for cryptic coloration.

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 792-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne P Pfeifer ◽  
Stefan Laurent ◽  
Vitor C Sousa ◽  
Catherine R Linnen ◽  
Matthieu Foll ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hernán E. Morales ◽  
Alexandra Pavlova ◽  
Nevil Amos ◽  
Richard Major ◽  
Andrzej Kilian ◽  
...  

AbstractMetabolic processes in eukaryotic cells depend on interactions between mitochondrial and nuclear gene products (mitonuclear interactions). These interactions could play a direct role in population divergence. We studied the evolution of mitonuclear interactions in a widespread passerine that experienced population divergence followed by bi-directional mitochondrial introgression into different nuclear backgrounds. Using >60,000 SNPs, we quantified patterns of nuclear genetic differentiation between populations that occupy different climates and harbour deeply divergent mitolineages despite ongoing nuclear gene flow. Analyses were performed independently for two sampling transects intersecting mitochondrial divergence in different nuclear backgrounds. In both transects, low genome-wide nuclear differentiation was accompanied by strong differentiation at a ~15.4 Mb region of chromosome 1A. This region is enriched for genes performing mitochondrial functions. Molecular signatures of selective sweeps in this region alongside those in the mitochondrial genome suggest a history of adaptive mitonuclear co-introgression. The chromosome 1A region has elevated linkage disequilibrium, suggesting that selection on genomic architecture may favour low recombination among nuclear-encoded genes with mitochondrial functions. In this system, mitonuclear interactions appear to maintain the geographic separation of two mitolineages in the face of nuclear gene flow, supporting mitonuclear co-evolution as an important vehicle for climatic adaptation and population divergence.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sandford

This article begins by outlining contemporary anti-work politics, which form the basis of Sandford’s reading. After providing a brief history of anti-work politics, Sandford examines recent scholarly treatments of Jesus’ relationship to work. An examination of a number of texts across the gospel traditions leads Sandford to argue that Jesus can be read as a ‘luxury communist’ whose behaviour flies in the face of the Protestant work ethic. Ultimately, Sandford foregrounds those texts in which Jesus discourages his followers from working, and undermines work as an ‘end in itself’, contextualising these statements in relation to other gospel texts about asceticism and the redistribution of wealth.


Author(s):  
Dunja Apostolov-Dimitrijevic

This paper explains political democratization in Post-Milosevic Serbia, utilizing two different accounts of the democratization process: one rooted in the rational choice framework and the other in structuralism. While rational choice explains the decisive role of political leadership in overcoming path dependence, the structuralist explanations show the transnational linkages that encourage democratization in the face of domestic setbacks. This particular debate between the two types of explanations represents the larger debate concerning the role of internal factors and external linkages in propelling democratization in transitional societies. The paper concludes by integrating the two sets of explanations offered by each theoretical perspective, in order to develop a coherent understanding of Serbia's democratization.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v9i1.240


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colton Byers ◽  
◽  
Cody Brown ◽  
Patrick Burkhart ◽  
Paul Baldauf ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Chris Forster

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Knust

The pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) is often interpreted as an inherently feminist story, one that validates women’s humanity in the face of a patriarchal order determined to reduce sexual sinners and women more generally to the status of object. Reading this story within a framework of queer narratology, however, leads to a different point of view, one that challenges the consequences of seeking rescue from a god and a text that are both quite willing to forge male homosocial bonds at a woman’s expense. As the history of this story also shows, texts and their meanings remain unsettled and therefore open to further unpredictable and contingent elaboration. Pondering my own feminist commitments, I attempt to imagine a world and a story where a woman is a person and Jesus is in need of rescue. Perhaps such a world is possible. Or perhaps it is not.


Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document