Planned intervention: On Wednesday April 3rd 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for up to 2-10 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published December 20, 2012 | Version v1
Dataset Open

Data from: Historical connectivity, contemporary isolation, and local adaptation in a widespread but discontinuously distributed species, Rhododendron oldhamii, endemic to Taiwan

  • 1. National Taiwan Normal University
  • 2. Taiwan Forestry Research Institute
  • 3. National Taiwan University

Description

Elucidation of the evolutionary processes that constrain or facilitate adaptive divergence is a central goal in evolutionary biology, especially in non-model organisms. We tested whether changes in dynamics of gene flow (historical vs contemporary) caused population isolation and examined local adaptation in response to environmental selective forces in fragmented Rhododendron oldhamii populations. Variation in 26 expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeat loci from 18 populations in Taiwan was investigated by examining patterns of genetic diversity, inbreeding, geographic structure, recent bottlenecks, and historical and contemporary gene flow. Selection associated with environmental variables was also examined. Bayesian clustering analysis revealed four regional population groups of north, central, south and southeast with significant genetic differentiation. Historical bottlenecks beginning 9168–13,092 years ago and ending 1584–3504 years ago were revealed by estimates using approximate Bayesian computation for all four regional samples analyzed. Recent migration within and across geographic regions was limited. However, major dispersal sources were found within geographic regions. Altitudinal clines of allelic frequencies of environmentally associated positively selected outliers were found, indicating adaptive divergence. Our results point to a transition from historical population connectivity toward contemporary population isolation and divergence on a regional scale. Spatial and temporal dispersal differences may have resulted in regional population divergence and local adaptation associated with environmental variables, which may have played roles as selective forces at a regional scale.

Notes

Files

R.oldhamii SSR for MSA.txt

Files (73.2 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:7a69641264fc9860f1ca7169132f7e15
73.2 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is cited by
10.1038/hdy.2013.31 (DOI)