Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Kelly Dyer
Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, United States
Daniel K Fabian
Institute of Population Genetics, Vetmeduni Vienna, Vienna, Austria; Centre for Pathogen Evolution, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
To advance our understanding of adaptation to temporally varying selection pressures, we identified signatures of seasonal adaptation occurring in parallel among Drosophila melanogaster populations. Specifically, we estimated allele frequencies genome-wide from flies sampled early and late in the growing season from 20 widely dispersed populations. We identified parallel seasonal allele frequency shifts across North America and Europe, demonstrating that seasonal adaptation is a general phenomenon of temperate fly populations. Seasonally fluctuating polymorphisms are enriched in large chromosomal inversions, and we find a broad concordance between seasonal and spatial allele frequency change. The direction of allele frequency change at seasonally variable polymorphisms can be predicted by weather conditions in the weeks prior to sampling, linking the environment and the genomic response to selection. Our results suggest that fluctuating selection is an important evolutionary force affecting patterns of genetic variation in Drosophila.
