Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2021

Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V51

miRNA signatures of canalisation

Höfundar / Authors: Quentin Horta-Lacueva, Zophonías Ó. Jónsson, Kalina H. Kapralova

Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Iceland

Kynnir / Presenter: Kalina Kapralova

Populations adapting to novel ecological niches (such as fish diverging between benthic and pelagic feeding habitats) experience a loss of phenotypic variability, a double-edged sword that enables the evolution of adaptive traits at the cost of missing ecological opportunities. This suppression of variability is often the result of canalisation, the buffering of developmental mechanisms, which remains poorly understood. By uncovering phenotypes that cannot be observed with traditional approaches, gene expression studies now provide new insights into canalisation and its ecological implications. We investigated whether variability in gene expression (signatures of canalisation) differs between populations subjected to contrasting selective regimes, such as habitats with more or less stable environmental conditions. We conducted a common garden experiment, and looked into gene expression during embryonic development of benthic (i.e. feeding on the bottom) and a limnetic (i.e. feeding in a water column) Arctic charr morphs (Salvelinus alpinus) from lake Thingvallavatn. We expected the offspring of the two morphs to differ in gene expression variability at major stages of head shape development. While we did not observe differences between morphs in the overall variability of gene expression, we discovered numerous clusters of genes with conserved expression or with less expression variability in one morph or the other (e.g. underlying more constrained ossification in the benthic morph or less variable endothelial development in the pelagic morph). This study provides a complex picture in which canalisation levels may be trait specific rather than a general characteristic of organisms.