The role of chromosomal inversions in the rapid evolution of biodiversity.

Understanding how biodiversity evolves is a defining question in evolutionary biology and instrumental in conservation and mitigation in the face of global change. Recent work, including ours, suggests that new combinations of old genetic variants are a driving force in rapid adaptive diversification. There is a large body of theory predicting that inversions – chromosomal rearrangements in which a segment of a chromosome is reversed end to end – play a decisive role in this process, for example, by linking together adapted alleles. There is strong evidence for the role of inversions in adaptation of natural species, but we are lacking a quantitative assessment of the role of inversions in diversification of a large group of related species. We will fill this gap by characterising the occurrence, evolution, and role of inversions across the fishes of the extraordinarily diverse Lake Malawi cichlid adaptive radiation. For this, we will combine innovative molecular and computational approaches with a unique set of hybrid crosses between species up to two million years divergent.

Keywords:COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY, EVOLUTIONARY GENOMICS, SPECIATION, CICHLIDS

Disciplines:Analysis of next-generation sequence data, Computational biomodelling and machine learning, Computational evolutionary biology, comparative genomics and population genomics, Speciation, Population, ecological and evolutionary genetics