Genome-wide patterns of nucleotide diversity and divergence in wild tomatoes (Solanum section Lycopersicon)
Plant Evolutionary Genetics
Under a genealogical (coalescent) perspective, DNA sequence data obtained from many unlinked genes contain footprints of demographic history and may reveal incidences of interspecific gene flow during the process of divergence. Understanding the demographic history of species is of great importance for interpreting patterns of nucleotide polymorphism, site frequency spectra (SFS), and linkage disequilibrium at “candidate” loci that might be involved in adaptive traits or reproductive isolation. Genomic regions with low recombination rates may facilitate the build-up of reproductive barriers and adaptive differentiation, but empirical data in plants to address these issues are still scarce. Wild tomatoes are ideally suited for such a project because of their recent divergence, differences in their mating system, and abundant genomic resources including estimates of recombination rate for hundreds of mapped nuclear markers. Due to population subdivision and its genealogical consequences, the aim of characterizing nucleotide diversity and the SFS can be accomplished in the least biased manner by a scattered sampling scheme across each species’ geographic ran
Research topics
Plant population genetics
Population subdivision and its consequences
Speciation and reproductive isolation
Demographic inference from DNA sequence data
Plant mating system evolution
Interdisciplinary
Arabidopsis mating system evolution
Molecular evolution and natural selection
Interspecific hybridization and its consequences
Detecting genomic regions under selection
