Conclusions
Overall, this study found four evolutionary lineages of white-footed mice in North America based on two mitochondrial regions, all of which diverged during Pleistocene glaciation. The most divergent lineage, Southwest, was largely limited to grassland and desert habitats whereas the other three mainly occurred in deciduous forest. Thus, Southwest could be adapted to such habitats and exhibit genomic change that allows them to persist outside the typical forested habitats of P. leucopus . This lineage, therefore, may represent incipient speciation as observed in other Peromyscus spp , but further clarification is needed, especially within contact zones to measure patterns in hybridization. Additionally, we recorded signatures of expansion in all four lineages, but these signals were particularly evident in the East and Midwest lineages. These lineages are known reservoirs for tick-borne illnesses, but current work has focused on regions where only East and Midwest occur (i.e., northern latitudes). Comparative little is known about the lineages of Central and Southwest, and their relationship toB. burgdorferi and other potential human pathogens. Collectively, these results highlight the complex evolutionary histories of cosmopolitan species like white-footed mice, and the importance of understanding these dynamics in reservoir species that are actively expanding.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Sydney Walters was involved in Conceptualization (Supporting), Data Curation (Lead), Formal Analysis (Supporting), Investigation (Lead), Methodology (Lead), Validation (Lead), and Writing-original draft (Supporting). Both Marketa Zimova and Jenifer Mallinoff contributed through Investigation (Supporting), Methodology (Supporting), Resources (Supporting), and Writing-review and editing (Equal). Elizabeth Kierepka participated through Conceptualization (Lead), Data Curation (Equal), Formal Analysis (Lead), Funding Acquisition (Lead), Investigation (Equal), Methodology (Equal), Project Administration (Lead), Supervision (Lead), Validation (Supporting), Visualization (Lead), Writing – original draft (Equal), and Writing – review and editing (Equal).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the mammal collections staff of the Museum of Southwestern Biology, Texas A&M University’s Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections, Museum of Texas Tech University, Angelo State Natural History Collection, and Arizona State University (NEON Biorepository) for providing tissue samples of Peromyscus leucopus .
FUNDING INFORMATION
Funding for this project was provided by the James R. and Judy Allen Pick Award at North Carolina State University and was instrumental in providing research experience for undergraduate scholars.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
All sequence data will be uploaded to Dryad and Genbank upon acceptance.
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Table 1. Diversity and expansion metrics for the full dataset of cytochrome b and control region (732 bp cytochrome b, 920 bp control region; 1652 bp total) for four lineages (Central, East, Midwest, and Southwest) and the total dataset (Total). Metrics include number of individuals (n), number of haplotypes (h), haplotype diversity (hD), nucleotide diversity (π), average pair-wise nucleotide differences (k), Fu’s Fs (Fs), and Tajima’s D (D). All Fu’s Fs values except in Central were significant (bold) while no Tajima’s D tests were significant.