Nature Communications (Jun 2024)

Temporal genomics in Hawaiian crickets reveals compensatory intragenomic coadaptation during adaptive evolution

  • Xiao Zhang,
  • Mark Blaxter,
  • Jonathan M. D. Wood,
  • Alan Tracey,
  • Shane McCarthy,
  • Peter Thorpe,
  • Jack G. Rayner,
  • Shangzhe Zhang,
  • Kirstin L. Sikkink,
  • Susan L. Balenger,
  • Nathan W. Bailey

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49344-4
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
pp. 1 – 19

Abstract

Read online

Abstract Theory predicts that compensatory genetic changes reduce negative indirect effects of selected variants during adaptive evolution, but evidence is scarce. Here, we test this in a wild population of Hawaiian crickets using temporal genomics and a high-quality chromosome-level cricket genome. In this population, a mutation, flatwing, silences males and rapidly spread due to an acoustically-orienting parasitoid. Our sampling spanned a social transition during which flatwing fixed and the population went silent. We find long-range linkage disequilibrium around the putative flatwing locus was maintained over time, and hitchhiking genes had functions related to negative flatwing-associated effects. We develop a combinatorial enrichment approach using transcriptome data to test for compensatory, intragenomic coevolution. Temporal changes in genomic selection were distributed genome-wide and functionally associated with the population’s transition to silence, particularly behavioural responses to silent environments. Our results demonstrate how ‘adaptation begets adaptation’; changes to the sociogenetic environment accompanying rapid trait evolution can generate selection provoking further, compensatory adaptation.