Genome-wide parallelism underlies contemporary adaptation in urban lizards

Urbanization drastically transforms landscapes, resulting in fragmentation, degradation, and the loss of local biodiversity. Yet, urban environments also offer opportunities to observe rapid evolutionary change in wild populations that survive and even thrive in these novel habitats. In many ways, c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2023-01, Vol.120 (3), p.e2216789120-e2216789120
Main Authors: Winchell, Kristin M, Campbell-Staton, Shane C, Losos, Jonathan B, Revell, Liam J, Verrelli, Brian C, Geneva, Anthony J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Adaptation, Physiological - genetics
Animals
Biodiversity
Biological Evolution
Biological Sciences
Cities
Contingency
Divergence
Ecosystem
Environmental changes
Evolution
Genetic diversity
Genome - genetics
Genomes
Genomics
Humans
Lizards
Lizards - genetics
Loci
Morphology
Populations
Urban areas
Urban environments
Urban populations
Urbanization
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Summary:Urbanization drastically transforms landscapes, resulting in fragmentation, degradation, and the loss of local biodiversity. Yet, urban environments also offer opportunities to observe rapid evolutionary change in wild populations that survive and even thrive in these novel habitats. In many ways, cities represent replicated "natural experiments" in which geographically separated populations adaptively respond to similar selection pressures over rapid evolutionary timescales. Little is known, however, about the genetic basis of adaptive phenotypic differentiation in urban populations nor the extent to which phenotypic parallelism is reflected at the genomic level with signatures of parallel selection. Here, we analyzed the genomic underpinnings of parallel urban-associated phenotypic change in , a small-bodied neotropical lizard found abundantly in both urbanized and forested environments. We show that phenotypic parallelism in response to parallel urban environmental change is underlain by genomic parallelism and identify candidate loci across the genome associated with this adaptive morphological divergence. Our findings point to polygenic selection on standing genetic variation as a key process to effectuate rapid morphological adaptation. Identified candidate loci represent several functions associated with skeletomuscular development, morphology, and human disease. Taken together, these results shed light on the genomic basis of complex morphological adaptations, provide insight into the role of contingency and determinism in adaptation to novel environments, and underscore the value of urban environments to address fundamental evolutionary questions.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2216789120