Resumen de Identification of the environmental variables driving adaptation in drosophila melanogaster natural populations
Understanding how species adapt to the environment is still an open question in Evolutionary Biology. While the focus has been on the genetic basis, the analysis of the environmental factors which drive these adaptive processes lags behind. Our main goal is to identify the main environmental variables that contribute to adaptation. We used natural D. melanogaster populations from Europe and North America, and analyzed both SNPs and transposable elements (TEs). To accurately detect and estimate TE population frequencies, we updated the T-lex algorithm and released a new version: T-lex3. We performed a Genome-Environment Association analysis (GEA) to associate TEs and SNP allele frequencies with several environmental variables, and we identified temperature, rain fall and wind as the relevant variables involved in environmental adaptation. In addition, we found 10 TEs associated with at least one environ mental variable. Finally, we developed a bioinformatic pipeline that integrates >200 D. melanogaster world-wide genomes, which will facilitate environmental analysis in space and time.
