@article{450b12f54aaa434a9edd45a852bcb02b,
title = "The ultimate and proximate mechanisms driving the evolution of long tails in forest deer mice",
abstract = "Understanding both the role of selection in driving phenotypic change and its underlying genetic basis remain major challenges in evolutionary biology. Here, we use modern tools to revisit a classic system of local adaptation in the North American deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus, which occupies two main habitat types: prairie and forest. Using historical collections, we find that forest-dwelling mice have longer tails than those from nonforested habitat, even when we account for individual and population relatedness. Using genome-wide SNP data, we show that mice from forested habitats in the eastern and western parts of their range form separate clades, suggesting that increased tail length evolved independently. We find that forest mice in the east and west have both more and longer caudal vertebrae, but not trunk vertebrae, than nearby prairie forms. By intercrossing prairie and forest mice, we show that the number and length of caudal vertebrae are not correlated in this recombinant population, indicating that variation in these traits is controlled by separate genetic loci. Together, these results demonstrate convergent evolution of the long-tailed forest phenotype through two distinct genetic mechanisms, affecting number and length of vertebrae, and suggest that these morphological changes—either independently or together—are adaptive.",
keywords = "Caudal vertebrae, Peromyscus maniculatus, convergence, local adaptation, parallel evolution, skeletal evolution",
author = "Kingsley, {Evan P.} and Kozak, {Krzysztof M.} and Susanne Pfeifer and Yang, {Dou Shuan} and Hoekstra, {Hopi E.}",
note = "Funding Information: The authors wish to thank Emily Hager, Jonathan Losos, Ricardo Mallarino, the associate editor, and four anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on the manuscript. Judy Chupasko facilitated work in the MCZ Mammal collection. Jonathan Losos, Luke Mahler, and Shane Campbell-Staton advised on comparative methods. The following individuals and institutions kindly provided tissue samples (a) and specimen records (b) used in this study: R. Mallarino, L. Turner, and A. Young (MCZ; a, b); S. Peurachs (Smithsonian Institution; a, b), C. Dardia (Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates; a, b), S. Hinshaw (University of Michigan Museum of Vertebrates; a, b), L. Olson (University of Alaska Museum of the North; a, b), J. Dunnum (University of New Mexico Museum of Southwestern Biology; a, b), C. Conroy (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley; a, b), P. Gegick (New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science; a, b), S. Woodward (Royal Ontario Museum; a, b), H. Garner (Texas Tech University; a, b), E. Rickart (Utah Museum of Natural History; a, b), R. Jennings (University of Western New Mexico; b), J. Storz (University of Nebraska; a), and the databases of the University of Florida Museum of Natural History (b) and the Burke Museum of Natural History at the University of Washington (b). Read alignment and variant calling were run at the Vital-IT Center (http://www.vital-it.ch) for high-performance computing of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). Phylogeographic analyses were run at the School of Life Sciences, University of Cambridge, with the assistance from J. Barna, and on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science, Research Computing Group at Harvard University. This work was supported by a Putnam Expedition Grant from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) and the Robert A. Chapman Memorial Scholarship from Harvard University to EPK; a Harvard PRISE Fellowship and undergraduate research grants from Harvard College and the MCZ to K.K.; and an NIH Genome Sciences Training Grant to D.S.Y. through the University of Washington. H.E.H. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Morphological data and unfiltered VCF and PLINK files are available from the FigShare repository (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1541235). SNP and mitochondrial alignment files with corresponding phylogenies were deposited in TreeBase (www.treebase.org; study 18261). Mitochondrial sequences were deposited in GenBank (accession numbers KU156828-KU156933). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2016 The Author(s). Evolution published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution.",
year = "2017",
month = feb,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1111/evo.13150",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "71",
pages = "261--273",
journal = "Evolution",
issn = "0014-3820",
publisher = "Society for the Study of Evolution",
number = "2",
}