Phenotypic plasticity in thermal tolerance in the Glanville fritillary butterfly.

Ambient temperature is an ubiquitous environmental factor affecting all organisms. Global climate change increases temperature variation and the frequency of extreme temperatures, which may pose challenges to ectotherms. Here, we examine phenotypic plasticity to temperature and genotypic effects on thermal tolerance in the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia). We found no significant difference in heat or cold tolerance in populations originating from a continental climate in China and from Finland with moderate temperature variation. Acclimation to large-amplitude temperature variation increased heat tolerance in both populations, but decreased cold tolerance and increased hsp70-2 expression in the Chinese population only. The latter result indicates a genotypic effect in the response to temperature variation. In the Finnish population, a non-synonymous SNP in the phosphoglucose isomerase (Pgi) gene was associated with heat knock-down time.

The Glanville fritillary genome retains an ancient karyotype and reveals selective chromosomal fusions in Lepidoptera.

Previous studies have reported that chromosome synteny in Lepidoptera has been well conserved, yet the number of haploid chromosomes varies widely from 5 to 223. Here we report the genome (393 Mb) of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia; Nymphalidae), a widely recognized model species in metapopulation biology and eco-evolutionary research, which has the putative ancestral karyotype of n=31. Using a phylogenetic analyses of Nymphalidae and of other Lepidoptera, combined with orthologue-level comparisons of chromosomes, we conclude that the ancestral lepidopteran karyotype has been n=31 for at least 140 My. We show that fusion chromosomes have retained the ancestral chromosome segments and very few rearrangements have occurred across the fusion sites. The same, shortest ancestral chromosomes have independently participated in fusion events in species with smaller karyotypes. The short chromosomes have higher rearrangement rate than long ones. These characteristics highlight distinctive features of the evolutionary dynamics of butterflies and moths.