Collaborative Research: The genomic basis of dramatic, rapid, convergent evolution in the killifish Fundulus heteroclitus

生活在城市河口的大西洋剑鱼种群迅速和反复地进化出对极端污染胁迫的耐受性，但使这种适应性耐受性的遗传变化尚不清楚。这笔赠款将促进对千里鱼全基因组的测序，并对许多敏感和耐受的种群的基因组进行重新测序，以发现促进对人类污染物耐受性的基因变化，并解决在许多居住在受污染地点的不同种群中，是否存在少数或许多遗传变异使其对污染具有耐受性或敏感性。进化生物学和医学遗传学的一个主要目标是确定种群内和种群之间有助于个人对压力或疾病的耐受性的遗传变异。例如，人类个体对疾病和环境污染物的敏感度不同，这种差异的一部分是有遗传基础的。对暴露在污染物中的剑鱼基因组变化的研究为发现脊椎动物对常见环境污染物的个体敏感性的遗传基础提供了一个极好的机会，因为脊椎动物与人类有许多共同的特征。这项研究可以确定导致人类对环境污染物暴露敏感的基因变异，并提供对进化过程的基本机制的详细洞察。

Populations of the Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) inhabiting urban estuaries have rapidly and repeatedly evolved tolerance to extreme pollution stress, yet the genetic changes that enabled this adaptive tolerance are unknown. This grant will facilitate sequencing the full killifish genome, and re-sequencing of genomes from many sensitive and tolerant populations, to enable discovery of the genetic changes that facilitated tolerance to human pollutants, and address whether there are a few or many genetic variants that confer tolerance or sensitivity to pollution among the many different populations inhabiting polluted sites.A major ambition of both evolutionary biology and medical genetics is to identify the genetic variants within and among populations that contribute to an individual's tolerance to stress or disease. For example, human individuals vary in their sensitivity to disease and environmental pollutants, and a portion of this variation has a genetic basis. Studies of the genomic changes in killifish exposed to pollutants provide an excellent opportunity to discover the genetic basis of individual sensitivity to common environmental pollutants in a vertebrate animal that shares many traits with humans. This research could identify genetic variants that contribute to human sensitivity to environmental pollutant exposures and also offer detailed insight into fundamental mechanisms of the evolutionary process.