Analysis of Structural Variants in Four African Cichlids Highlights an Association With Developmental and Immune Related Genes

Abstract

African Lakes Cichlids are one of the most impressive example of adaptive radiation.Independently in Lake Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi, several hundreds of species arose within the last 10 million to 100,000 years. Whereas most analyses in Cichlids focused on nucleotide substitutions across species to investigate the genetic bases of this explosive radiation, to date, no study has investigated the contribution of structural variants (SVs) to speciation events (through a reduction of gene flow) and adaptat…