A phylogenetic examination of host use evolution in the quinaria and testacea groups of Drosophila

Abstract

Adaptive radiations provide an opportunity to examine complex evolutionary processes such as ecological specialization and speciation. While a well-resolved phylogenetic hypothesis is critical to completing such studies, the rapid rates of evolution in these groups can impede phylogenetic studies. Here we study the quinaria and testacea species groups of the immigrans-tripunctata radiation of Drosophila, which represent a recent adaptive radiation and are a developing model system for ecological genetics. We were especially interested in understanding host use evolution in these species. In order to infer a phylogenetic hypothesis for this group we sampled loci from both the nuclear genome and the mitochondrial DNA to develop a dataset of 43 protein-coding loci for these two groups along with their close relatives in the immigrans-tripunctata radiation. We used this dataset to examine their evolutionary relationships along with the evolution of feeding behavior. Our analysis recovers strong support for the monophyly of the testacea but not the quinaria group. Results from our ancestral state reconstruction analysis suggests that the ancestor of the testacea and quinaria groups exhibited mushroom-feeding. Within the quinaria group, we infer that transition to vegetative feeding occurred twice, and that this transition did not coincide with a genome-wide change in the rate of protein evolution.

Putative condition-dependent viability selection in wild type stocks ofDrosophila pseudoobscura

“…Although there has been a lot of work done in D. melanogaster, there are other Drosophila species that may be more sensitive to environmental perturbations for studying this important phenomenon. For example, cactophilic (Markow, 2019) and mushroom feeding (Scott Chialvo et al, 2019) Drosophila represent recent adaptive radiations with growing potential for ecological genomics. Additionally, the montium species group has recently become genome-enabled and is well suited for testing various evolutionary hypotheses (Bronski et al, 2020).…”

Sexually monomorphic wing pigmentation pattern does not contribute to mate choice inDrosophila guttifera

“…Fly Drosophila guttifera inhabits North America and is related to the quinaria group (Chialvo, White, Reed, & Dyer, 2019;Izumitani, Kusaka, Koshikawa, Toda, & Katoh, 2016). In this study, adults of the wild type D. guttifera (stock number 15130-1971.10, provided by the Drosophila Species Stock Center at the University of California, San Diego) kept in our laboratory were used.…”

Transcriptome analysis reveals evolutionary co-option of neural development and signaling genes for the wing pigmentation pattern of the polka-dotted fruit fly

“…Drosophila guttifera is a North American species that belongs to (or is closely related to) the quinaria group of subgenus Drosophila [47,48] (Table 1, Table 2). The assembly sequences had 767 scaffolds with a total length of 168 .4 Mb and a scaffold N50 length of 1.8 Mb.…”