Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Evolutionary adaptation to new environments likely results from a combination of selective sweeps and polygenic shifts, depending on the genetic architecture of traits under selection. While selective sweeps have been widely studied, polygenic responses are considered more prevalent but challenging to quantify. The infinitesimal model makes explicit the hypothesis about the dynamics of changes in allele frequencies under selection, where only allelic effect sizes, frequencies, linkage, and LD matter. Departures from this, like long-range correlations of allele frequency changes, could be a signal of epistasis in polygenic response. We performed an E&R experiment in Drosophila melanogaster exposing flies to a high-sugar diet as a source of environmental stress for over 100 generations. We tracked allele frequency changes using >4000 flies and searched for loci under selection by identifying sites with allele frequency trajectories that differentiated selection regimes consistently across replicates. We estimate that at least 4% of the genome was under positive selection, the result of a highly polygenic response, in line with theoretical expectations. Most of the selected loci show no signature of hard sweeps. We then searched for signatures of selection on pairwise combinations in the new environment and find several strong signals of putative epistatic interactions across unlinked loci that were consistent across selected populations. Finally, we measure differentially expressed genes across treatments and show that DEGs are enriched for selected SNPs, suggesting a regulatory basis for the selective response. Our results suggest that epistatic contributions to polygenic response are common and lead to detectable signatures.