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Abstract
As a direct result of intense heat and aridity, deserts are thought to be among the most harsh of environments, particularly for their mammalian inhabitants. Given that osmoregulation can be challenging for these animals, with failure resulting in death, strong selection should be observed on genes related to the maintenance of water and solute balance. One such animal, Peromyscus eremicus, is native to the desert regions of the southwest United States and may live its entire life without oral fluid intake. As a first step toward understanding the genetics that underlie this phenotype, we present a characterization of the P. eremicus transcriptome. We assay four tissues (kidney, liver, brain, testes) from a single individual and supplement this with population level renal transcriptome sequencing from 15 additional animals. We identified a set of transcripts undergoing both purifying and balancing selection based on estimates of Tajima’s D. In addition, we used the branch-site test to identify a transcript—Slc2a9, likely related to desert osmoregulation—undergoing enhanced selection in P. eremicus relative to a set of related non-desert rodents.
Department
Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences
Publication Date
Fall 10-28-2014
Journal Title
PeerJ
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.642
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
MacManes MD, Eisen MB. (2014) Characterization of the transcriptome, nucleotide sequence polymorphism, and natural selection in the desert adapted mouse Peromyscus eremicus. PeerJ 2:e642 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.642
Rights
© 2014 MacManes and Eisen
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Computational Biology Commons, Desert Ecology Commons, Evolution Commons, Genomics Commons