Many adaptive traits are polygenic and frequently more loci contributing to the phenotype are segregating than needed to express the phenotypic optimum. Experimental evolution with replicated populations adapting to a new controlled environment provides a powerful approach to study polygenic adaptation. Because genetic redundancy often results in nonparallel selection responses among replicates, we propose a modified evolve and resequence (E&R) design that maximizes the similarity among replicates. Rather than starting from many founders, we only use two inbred Drosophila melanogaster strains and expose them to a very extreme, hot temperature environment (29 °C). After 20 generations, we detect many genomic regions with a strong, highly parallel selection response in 10 evolved replicates. The X chromosome has a more pronounced selection response than the autosomes, which may be attributed to dominance effects. Furthermore, we find that the median selection coefficient for all chromosomes is higher in our two-genotype experiment than in classic E&R studies. Because two random genomes harbor sufficient variation for adaptive responses, we propose that this approach is particularly well-suited for the analysis of polygenic adaptation.
Keywords: Drosophila melanogaster; evolve and resequence; experimental evolution; inbred strains; parallelism; polygenic trait.
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.