Emily Giles

and 8 more

Understanding the drivers of heterogenous genomic divergence is essential for uncovering the mechanisms that generate and constrain biodiversity. The extent to which adaptation and speciation are facilitated by reorganization of the recombination landscape remains untested in many systems. Marine ecosystems, with their dynamic and fluid habitats, offer a compelling context to investigate genomic divergence. In this study we mapped genomic divergence and selection across recombination landscapes of parapatric marine snail sister species that we show have recently undergone secondary contact. Regions of reduced recombination were enriched for genes exhibiting signatures of negative selection, whereas regions of high recombination were associated with genes under putative positive selection. Notably, the recombination landscape of the population in parapatry of one species (Scurria viridula) differs markedly from that of the other population within this same species, highlighting the role of introgression in reshaping recombination landscapes. In the other species (Scurria zebrina), conservation of the recombination landscape and divergent selection among populations suggest trapping of beneficial allele combinations in regions of low recombination maintain the identity of this species. Among species, signals of divergence with gene flow consistently cluster within specific genomic regions characterized by high recombination rate variation among the populations of S. viridula. These results challenge theoretical expectations of recombination evolution by showing that the causes of genomic divergence can be population- specific. This study demonstrates that recombination landscapes are key modulators of genomic divergence, with contemporary evolutionary shifts that could enable populations to adapt to distinct environments. Our findings provide new insights into the interplay between recombination, selection, and gene flow during speciation, underscoring the complexity of evolutionary trajectories in marine systems.

Emily Giles

and 8 more

Comparative genomic studies of closely related taxa are important for our understanding of the causes of divergence on a changing Earth. This being said, the genomic resources available for marine intertidal molluscs are limited and currently, there are few publicly available high-quality annotated genomes for intertidal habitats and for molluscs in general. Here we report transcriptome assemblies for six species of Patellogastropoda and genome assemblies and annotations for three of these species (Scurria scurra, Scurria viridula, and Scurria zebrina). Comparative analysis using these genomic resources suggest that there was a large gene family contraction during the early evolutionary history of Patellogastropoda (140-170 Mya) and recently diverging lineages (10-20 Mya) have experienced similar amounts of contractions and expansions but across different gene families. Furthermore, differences among recently diverged species are reflected in variation in the amount of coding and noncoding material in genomes, such as amount of repetitive elements and lengths of transcripts and introns and exons. Additionally, functional ontologies of species-specific and duplicated genes together with demographic inference support the finding that recent divergence among members of the genus Scurria aligns with their unique ecological characteristics. Overall, the resources presented here will be extremely valuable for future studies of adaptation in molluscs and in intertidal habitats as a whole.