Adaptive shifts in gene regulation underlie a developmental delay in thermogenesis in high-altitude deer mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aerobic performance is tied to fitness as it influences an animal’s ability to find food, escape predators, or survive extreme conditions. At high altitude, where low O 2 availability and persistent cold prevail, maximum metabolic heat production (thermogenesis) is an aerobic performance trait that is intimately linked to survival. Understanding how thermogenesis evolves to enhance survival at high altitude will yield insight into the links between physiology, performance, and fitness. Recent work in deer mice ( Peromyscus maniculatus ) has shown that adult mice native to high-altitude have higher thermogenic capacities under hypoxia compared to lowland conspecifics, but developing high-altitude pups delay the onset of thermogenesis. This suggests that natural selection on thermogenic capacity varies across life stages. To determine the mechanistic cause of this ontogenetic delay, we analyzed the transcriptomes of thermo-effector organs – brown adipose tissue and skeletal muscle – in developing deer mice native to low- and high-altitude. We demonstrate that the developmental delay in thermogenesis is associated with adaptive shifts in the expression of genes involved in nervous system development, fuel/O 2 supply, and oxidative metabolism gene pathways. Our results demonstrate that selection has modified the developmental trajectory of the thermoregulatory system at high altitude and has done so by acting on the regulatory systems that control the maturation of thermo-effector tissues. We suggest that the cold and hypoxic conditions of high altitude may force a resource allocation trade-off, whereby limited energy is allocated to developmental processes such as growth, versus active thermogenesis during early development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".