Regionally specific and highly pleiotropic loci together mediate skeletal evolution in tropical and temperate house mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When organisms are exposed to new environments, they often evolve a suite of adaptive phenotypic changes. Understanding the genetic basis of these changes gives us insight into the factors that constrain and facilitate the process of adaptation. Here we use quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in wild-derived house mice from temperate and tropical environments to describe the genetic architecture of adaptive skeletal evolution. This study provides a unique view into the evolution of discordant phenotypic changes within the interconnected skeletal system, since tropical and temperate mice have evolved under the opposing forces of Allen’s and Bergmann’s rules (shorter extremities, but larger body size in cold climates). We generated an F3 mapping population of 449 mice and measured a variety of cranial and post-cranial skeletal traits. First, we discovered that temperate and tropical house mice have undergone extensive skeletal divergence in accordance with Allen’s and Bergmann’s rules. Warm-adapted mice have longer limbs, longer pelvic girdles, longer and narrower skulls, but smaller overall body size. Second, we identified 83 QTL across 13 traits and found that the genetic basis of skeletal divergence involved mainly additive, small-effect loci distributed across the genome. While most QTL influenced only one or two traits, we also identified several highly pleiotropic QTL that influenced multiple traits across the skeletal system, often antagonistically to the evolved difference. Such pleiotropic loci may constrain adaptation. Lastly, we found that QTL for overall skeletal variation were enriched for signatures of selection in wild house mouse populations, providing evidence that skeletal variation in this system is indeed driven by adaptive evolution. Article Summary The incredible diversity of the vertebrate skeleton offers an opportunity to explore the genetic architecture of phenotypic variation, which is essential to understanding the process of evolution. We characterize the genetic basis of morphological evolution using QTL mapping in house mice adapted to differing climates. Skeletal divergence is widespread in these mice and reflects temperature adaptation. This divergence is mediated by small-effect loci scattered across the genome, as well as several highly-pleiotropic loci. Interestingly, pleiotropic loci often influence phenotypes in the opposite direction from the evolved change, perhaps constraining the process of adaptation. This work demonstrates how complex morphological changes can evolve within an interconnected system, such as the skeleton, under functional, developmental, and selective constraints.
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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".