Searching for the genes that separate species

Abstract

Hybrid mice shed new light on the interactions between regions of the genome that help drive the evolution of new species by reducing the fertility of hybrid males.

Keywords: evolutionary biology; genomics; hybrid zone; mouse; reproductive isolation; speciation.

Figure 1.. Many regions of the house mouse genome are associated with variation in the expression of genes in the testes, a trait related to male sterility.

In this map—taken from Turner and Harr, 2014—the edge of the circle indicates the position in the genome along the chromosomes pairs 1–19 and the pair of sex chromosomes X and Y. The purple boxes indicate the regions that the genome wide association study found to be associated with gene expression in the testes of hybrid male mice. The lines show which regions interact with each other, and the color indicates how variable the DNA sequences of these regions are (grey represents high variability; deep purple represents high variability). The green lines indicate genome regions that were associated with variation in testis weight in the study. The orange and yellow boxes indicate the genome regions that have been previously identified using other approaches.