Frequency of Emphasis Type="Italic"Ectodysplasin

Authors: Michael A Bell Anup K Gangavalli Adam Bewick Windsor E Aguirre

Publish Date: 2010/09/01

Volume: 89, Issue: 2, Pages: 189-198

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Abstract

The threespine stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus is primitively an anadromous or resident marine species but has repeatedly colonized fresh water where predictable phenotypic divergence usually occurs rapidly A conspicuous element of this divergence is change of the number and position of lateral armor plates from about 33 that cover the entire flank complete to 10 anterior plates low This difference is caused primarily by variation at the Ectodysplasin Eda locus The low Eda allele appears to be rarer in two geographically adjacent anadromous populations from Cook Inlet Alaska than in most marine or anadromous populations reported from elsewhere and there is no evidence of elevated gene flow for Eda between anadromous and resident lake threespine stickleback populations that breed in sympatry However the two anadromous populations are divergent for the frequencies of two complete Eda alleles It is not clear how monomorphic lowplated freshwater populations in Cook Inlet have almost invariably acquired ancestral low Eda alleles from anadromous ancestors in which this allele appears to be extremely rareWe thank M Bobb K E Ellis P J Park and A Plaunova for field assistance E Hughes and A Litewka for help with Eda genotyping C L Peichel J Kitano and D Schluter for providing Eda frequencies from their studies FJ Rohlf for advice on calculating frequency limits for rare alleles M FisherReid X Hua D Moen K Slovak C Ulloa and J Wiens for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and two anonymous reviewers for constructive criticism Support to WEA from the W Burghardt Turner Fellowship and Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate is gratefully acknowledged Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant 52005887 to the Long Island Group Advancing Science Education LIGASE at Stony Brook University supported AB and AKG for this research and several undergraduate assistants were supported by National Institutes of Health grant GM50070 to LIGASE Field sampling was supported by National Science Foundation grants DEB0211391 and DEB0322818 to MAB and F J Rohlf This is contribution 1203 from Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University

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