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

居住在城市河口的大西洋鳉（Fundulus heteroclitus）种群对极端污染压力的耐受性迅速而反复地进化，然而使这种适应性耐受性的基因变化尚不清楚。这笔拨款将促进对整个鳉鱼基因组的测序，并对许多敏感和耐受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的基因变化，并解决在居住在污染地点的许多不同种群中是否存在少数或许多遗传变异赋予对污染的耐受或敏感。进化生物学和医学遗传学的一个主要目标是确定种群内部和种群之间的遗传变异，这些变异有助于个体对压力或疾病的耐受性。例如，人类个体对疾病和环境污染物的敏感性各不相同，这种差异的一部分具有遗传基础。对暴露于污染物中的鳉鱼的基因组变化的研究提供了一个极好的机会，可以发现与人类具有许多特征的脊椎动物对常见环境污染物的个体敏感性的遗传基础。这项研究可以确定导致人类对环境污染物暴露敏感的遗传变异，并为进化过程的基本机制提供详细的见解。

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.