Common mechanism underlies repeated evolution of extreme pollution tolerance.
Proc Biol Sci
; 279(1728): 427-33, 2012 Feb 07.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-21733895
ABSTRACT
Human alterations to the environment can exert strong evolutionary pressures, yet contemporary adaptation to human-mediated stressors is rarely documented in wildlife populations. A common-garden experimental design was coupled with comparative transcriptomics to discover evolved mechanisms enabling three populations of killifish resident in urban estuaries to survive normally lethal pollution exposure during development, and to test whether mechanisms are unique or common across populations. We show that killifish populations from these polluted sites have independently converged on a common adaptive mechanism, despite variation in contaminant profiles among sites. These populations are united by a similarly profound desensitization of aryl-hydrocarbon receptor-mediated transcriptional activation, which is associated with extreme tolerance to the lethal effects of toxic dioxin-like pollutants. The rapid, repeated, heritable and convergent nature of evolved tolerance suggests that ancestral killifish populations harboured genotypes that enabled adaptation to twentieth-century industrial pollutants.
Texto completo:
1
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Variação Genética
/
Poluentes Químicos da Água
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Bifenilos Policlorados
/
Regulação da Expressão Gênica no Desenvolvimento
/
Fundulidae
Limite:
Animals
País/Região como assunto:
America do norte
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Proc Biol Sci
Assunto da revista:
BIOLOGIA
Ano de publicação:
2012
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Estados Unidos