Accumulation of gene copy number variations during the early phase of free‐spawning abalone speciation

Abstract

A major goal in marine biology is understanding the genetic basis of speciation in free-spawning marine invertebrates (Pogson, 2016).Genomic analyses based on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci have identified candidates for genetic variation that contributes to marine speciation (Hirase et al., 2021;Momigliano et al., 2017).However, a growing body of evidence suggests that gene copy number variations (GCNVs) also play an important role in the ecological divergence of various organisms (Castagnone-Sereno et al., 2019;