Repeated origins, widespread gene flow, and allelic interactions of target-site herbicide resistance mutations
Abstract
Causal mutations and their frequency in agricultural fields are well-characterized for herbicide resistance. However, we still lack understanding of their evolutionary history: the extent of parallelism in the origins of target-site resistance (TSR), how long these mutations persist, how quickly they spread, and allelic interactions that mediate their selective advantage. We addressed these questions with genomic data from 18 agricultural populations of common waterhemp (Amaranthus tuberculatus), which we show to have undergone a massive expansion over the past century, with a contemporary effective population size (Ne) estimate of 8x107. We found variation at seven characterized TSR loci, two of which had multiple amino acid substitutions, and three of which were common. These three common resistance variants show parallelism in their mutational origins, with gene flow having shaped their distribution across the landscape. Allele age estimates supported a strong role of adaptation from de novo mutations, with a median allele age of 30 suggesting that most resistance alleles arose soon after the onset of herbicide use. However, resistant lineages varied in both their age and evidence for selection over two different timescales, implying considerable heterogeneity in the forces that govern their persistence. The evolutionary history of TSR has also been shaped by both intra- and inter-locus allelic interactions. We report a signal of extended haplotype competition between two common TSR alleles, and extreme linkage with genome-wide alleles with known functions in resistance adaptation. Together, this work reveals a remarkable example of spatial parallel evolution in a metapopulation, with important implications for the management of herbicide resistance.
Data availability
Sequencing data used in this paper were previously deposited in ENA under project number PRJEB31711, and reference genome is available on CoGe (reference ID = 54057). Code used to generate results in this paper is available at https://github.com/jkreinz/TSRevolution.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (PGS-D)
- Julia M Kreiner
Society for the Study of Evolution (Rosemary Grant Advanced Award)
- Julia M Kreiner
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery Grant)
- John Stinchcombe
- Stephen Isaac Wright
Canada Research Chairs (Population Genomics)
- Stephen Isaac Wright
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems Magdeburg
- Detlef Weigel
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Philipp W Messer, Cornell University, United States
Version history
- Preprint posted: May 10, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: May 11, 2021
- Accepted: January 16, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 17, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 28, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Kreiner et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,893
- views
-
- 305
- downloads
-
- 12
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Evolutionary Biology
The emergence of new protein functions is crucial for the evolution of organisms. This process has been extensively researched for soluble enzymes, but it is largely unexplored for membrane transporters, even though the ability to acquire new nutrients from a changing environment requires evolvability of transport functions. Here, we demonstrate the importance of environmental pressure in obtaining a new activity or altering a promiscuous activity in members of the amino acid-polyamine-organocation (APC)-type yeast amino acid transporters family. We identify APC members that have broader substrate spectra than previously described. Using in vivo experimental evolution, we evolve two of these transporter genes, AGP1 and PUT4, toward new substrate specificities. Single mutations on these transporters are found to be sufficient for expanding the substrate range of the proteins, while retaining the capacity to transport all original substrates. Nonetheless, each adaptive mutation comes with a distinct effect on the fitness for each of the original substrates, illustrating a trade-off between the ancestral and evolved functions. Collectively, our findings reveal how substrate-adaptive mutations in membrane transporters contribute to fitness and provide insights into how organisms can use transporter evolution to explore new ecological niches.
-
- Evolutionary Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
Copy number variation in large gene families is well characterized for plant resistance genes, but similar studies are rare in animals. The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has hundreds of NLR immune genes, making this species ideal for studying this phenomenon. By sequencing 93 zebrafish from multiple wild and laboratory populations, we identified a total of 1513 NLRs, many more than the previously known 400. Approximately half of those are present in all wild populations, but only 4% were found in 80% or more of the individual fish. Wild fish have up to two times as many NLRs per individual and up to four times as many NLRs per population than laboratory strains. In contrast to the massive variability of gene copies, nucleotide diversity in zebrafish NLR genes is very low: around half of the copies are monomorphic and the remaining ones have very few polymorphisms, likely a signature of purifying selection.