Climate-change driven adaptation and speciation: ecology meets 3D genomics

We will study how ecological (e.g. diet and habitat) and demographic factors together with allelic variation in fitness-traits and aspects of the genome 3D structure (e.g. structural variants and methylation patterns) affect adaptive responses to ongoing climate change in pied and collared flycatchers.

We will also investigate if divergent climate adaptation played a central role in their evolutionary history when they became two separate species.

Long-term phenotypic data (22-years) is already collected and several sequencing technologies will be used in the first project year to generate corresponding genomic information. A PhD student will be hired to mainly focus on combining information from these extensive datasets through e.g. Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) methods.

As many fitness-traits are polygenic and ecological adaptation often rely on coordinated changes in suits of traits, we will develop methods that take this complexity into account, thereby improving the predictions about future adaptive changes.

The role of divergent climate adaptation in speciation will be evaluated by testing if the above identified gene networks contain fixed differences between the two species that cause hybrid dysfunction and thereby reproductive isolation.

Our results will lead to in-depth insights on factors affecting climate-driven adaptation and speciation and the GWAS developments have the potential to be of great use also in medicine and animal breeding.