Complex patterns shape immune genes diversity during invasion of common raccoon in Europe – Selection in action despite genetic drift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Rapid adaptation is common in invasive populations and is crucial to their long‐term success. The primary target of selection in the invasive species' new range is standing genetic variation. Therefore, genetic drift and natural selection acting on existing variation are key evolutionary processes through which invaders will evolve over a short timescale. In this study, we used the case of the raccoon Procyon lotor invasion in Europe to identify the forces shaping the diversity of immune genes during invasion. The genes involved in the defence against infection should be under intense selection pressure in the invasive range where novel pathogens are expected to occur. To disentangle the selective and demographic processes shaping the adaptive immune diversity of its invasive and expanding populations, we have developed species‐specific single‐nucleotide polymorphism markers located in the coding regions of targeted immune‐related genes. We characterised the genetic diversity of 110 functionally important immune genes in two invasive and one native raccoon genetic clusters, each presenting a different demographic history. Despite the strong effect of demographic processes in the invasive clusters, we detected a subset of genes exhibiting the diversity pattern suggestive of selection. The most likely process shaping the variation in those genes was balancing selection. The selected genes belong to toll‐like receptors and cytokine‐related genes. Our results suggest that the prevalence of selection depends on the level of diversity, that is – less genetically diverse invasive population from the Czech Republic displayed fewer signs of selection. Our results highlight the role of standing genetic variation in adapting to new environment. Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms behind invasion success would enable predicting how populations may respond to environmental change.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".