Abstract
Background: Recent efforts to assemble and analyze the Ambystoma mexicanum genome have dramatically improved the potential to develop molecular tools and pursue genome-wide analyses of genetic variation. Results: To better resolve the distribution and origins of genetic variation with A mexicanum, we compared DNA sequence data for two laboratory A mexicanum and one A tigrinum to identify 702 million high confidence polymorphisms distributed across the 32 Gb genome. While the wild-caught A tigrinum was generally more polymorphic in a genome-wide sense, several multi-megabase regions were identified from A mexicanum genomes that were actually more polymorphic than A tigrinum. Analysis of polymorphism and repeat content reveals that these regions likely originated from the intentional hybridization of A mexicanum and A tigrinum that was used to introduce the albino mutation into laboratory stocks. Conclusions: Our findings show that axolotl genomes are variable with respect to introgressed DNA from a highly polymorphic species. It seems likely that other divergent regions will be discovered with additional sequencing of A mexicanum. This has practical implications for designing molecular probes and suggests a need to study A mexicanum phenotypic variation and genome evolution across the tiger salamander clade.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 822-837 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Developmental Dynamics |
Volume | 250 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC
Keywords
- SNPs
- axolotl
- genome
- hybrid
- salamander
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Developmental Biology