Genomic signatures of thermal adaptation are associated with clinal shifts of life history in a broadly distributed frog

Abstract

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Diverse aging rates in ectothermic tetrapods provide insights for the evolution of aging and longevity

“…By definition, increasing environmental temperature increases ectotherm metabolic rate (barring offsetting thermoregulatory behavior) and putatively hastens accumulation of molecular damage through multiple processes, such as free radical production, telomere attrition, secretion of cytokines from senescent cells, and DNA damage ( 57 ). For example, in garter snakes and the Columbia spotted frog, thermal differences among populations have been hypothesized to be an agent of selection for life-history divergence, including aging ( 33 , 58 ). Laboratory experiments that raise ectotherms under different thermal regimes can directly test for the proximate effect of temperature on aging ( 59 ) and are necessary to tease apart how temperature might influence the evolution of aging.…”

“…Accordingly, the thermoregulatory mode hypothesis predicts that ectothermic lineages have evolved lower aging rates and greater longevities than their similarly sized endothermic counterparts ( 29 , 30 ). Layered on top of metabolic mode, environmental temperature itself is expected to be a strong driver of mortality in ectotherms, affecting both the evolution and the plasticity of aging through metabolic mechanisms [( 10 , 31 , 32 ), but see ( 33 )]. Within many endothermic species, individuals with lower body temperatures live longer and age slower than those with higher body temperatures ( 29 , 34 ), but across species, this pattern is less clear ( 35 ).…”

Understanding climate change response in the age of genomics

“…Chromosomal inversions can play a role in adaptation by maintaining locally beneficial haplotypes (Fuller et al, 2017;Wellenreuther et al, 2019;Wellenreuther & Bernatchez, 2018), simple sequence repeats have been shown to regulate gene expression (Yuan et al, 2021) and CNVs (e.g. Cayuela et al, 2022)…”

“…Lastly, one of the contributions is pioneering an approach that goes beyond SNPs, by extending the genomic variant catalogue to copy number variants (CNVs) as well as transposons and retrotransposons. Cayuela et al (2022) use an extensive mark–recapture dataset of ~20,000 Columbian spotted frogs Rana luteiventris to investigate climate‐driven genomic adaptations. Frog populations were studied for 14–18 years along a temperature gradient in the western United States, and several life‐history traits, including adult survival, life span, senescence rate, recruitment and population growth, were analysed to detect clinal shifts.…”

“…Chromosomal inversions can play a role in adaptation by maintaining locally beneficial haplotypes (Fuller et al, 2017; Wellenreuther et al, 2019; Wellenreuther & Bernatchez, 2018), simple sequence repeats have been shown to regulate gene expression (Yuan et al, 2021) and CNVs (e.g. Cayuela et al, 2022) have been used to understand climate‐related genotype–phenotype associations. Moreover, the role of epigenetic variation is becoming increasingly recognised as an important component of population and evolutionary responses to climate change (McGuigan et al, 2021).…”