UPPMAX resources used for eLife publication on herring genome

UPPMAX resources were used for a publication in eLife on ecological adaptations of the Atlantic herring when the species expanded to the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea. The study was published on May 03, 2016. The genetic basis for ecological adaptation of the Atlantic herring revealed by genome sequencing  Alvaro Martinez Barrio, Sangeet Lamichhaney, Guangyi Fan, Nima Rafati, Mats Pettersson, He Zhang, Jacques Dainat, Diana Ekman, Marc Höppner, Patric Jern, Marcel Martin, Björn Nystedt, Xin Liu, Wenbin Chen, Xinming Liang, Chengcheng Shi, Yuanyuan Fu, Kailong Ma, Xiao Zhan, Chungang Feng, Ulla Gustafson, Carl-Johan Rubin, Markus Sällman Almén, Martina Blass, Michele Casini, Arild Folkvord, Linda Laikre, Nils Ryman, Simon Ming-Yuen Lee, Xun Xu, Leif Andersson   DOI: 10.7554/eLife.12081 

Abstract: Ecological adaptation is of major relevance to speciation and sustainable population management, but the underlying genetic factors are typically hard to study in natural populations due to genetic differentiation caused by natural selection being confounded with genetic drift in subdivided populations. Here, we use whole genome population sequencing of Atlantic and Baltic herring to reveal the underlying genetic architecture at an unprecedented detailed resolution for both adaptation to a new niche environment and timing of reproduction. We identify almost 500 independent loci associated with a recent niche expansion from marine (Atlantic Ocean) to brackish waters (Baltic Sea), and more than 100 independent loci showing genetic differentiation between spring- and autumn-spawning populations irrespective of geographic origin. Our results show that both coding and non-coding changes contribute to adaptation. Haplotype blocks, often spanning multiple genes and maintained by selection, are associated with genetic differentiation.

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