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Hybridization with introduced rainbow trout threatens most native westslope cutthroat trout populations. Understanding the genetic effects of hybridization and introgression requires a large set of high-throughput, diagnostic genetic markers to inform conservation and management. Recently, we identified several thousand candidate single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers based on RAD sequencing of 11 westslope cutthroat trout and 13 rainbow trout individuals. Here, we used flanking sequence for 56 of these candidate SNP markers to design high-throughput genotyping assays. We validated the assays on a total of 92 individuals from 22 populations and seven hatchery strains. Forty-six assays (82%) amplified consistently...
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Whole-genome sequencing has provided fundamental insights into infectious disease epidemiology, but has rarely been used for examining transmission dynamics of a bacterial pathogen in wildlife. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), outbreaks of brucellosis have increased in cattle along with rising seroprevalence in elk. Here we use a genomic approach to examine Brucella abortus evolution, cross-species transmission and spatial spread in the GYE. We find that brucellosis was introduced into wildlife in this region at least five times. The diffusion rate varies among Brucella lineages (B3 to 8 km per year) and over time. We also estimate 12 host transitions from bison to elk, and 5 from elk to bison. Our results...
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Invasive hybridization and introgression pose a serious threat to the persistence of many native species. Understanding the effects of hybridization on native populations (e.g., fitness consequences) requires numerous species-diagnostic loci distributed genome-wide. Here we used RAD sequencing to discover thousands of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are diagnostic between rainbow trout (RBT, Oncorhynchus mykiss), the world’s most widely introduced fish, and native westslope cutthroat trout (WCT, O. clarkii lewisi) in the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. We advanced previous work that identified 4,914 species-diagnostic loci by using longer sequence reads (100 bp vs. 60 bp) and a larger set of individuals...
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Much remains unknown about the genetic status and population connectivity of high-elevation and high-latitude freshwater invertebrates, which often persist near snow and ice masses that are disappearing due to climate change. Here we report on the conservation genetics of the meltwater stonefly Lednia tumana (Ricker) of Montana, USA, a cold-water obligate species. We sequenced 1530 bp of mtDNA from 116 L. tumana individuals representing “historic” (>10 yr old) and 2010 populations. The dominant haplotype was common in both time periods, while the second-most-common haplotype was found only in historic samples, having been lost in the interim. The 2010 populations also showed reduced gene and nucleotide diversity...
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Hamilton and Miller (2016) provide an interesting and provocative discussion of how hybridization and introgression can promote evolutionary potential in the face of climate change. They argue that hybridization—mating between individuals from genetically distinct populations—can alleviate inbreeding depression and promote adaptive introgression and evolutionary rescue. We agree that deliberate intraspecific hybridization (mating between individuals of the same species) is an underused management tool for increasing fitness in inbred populations (i.e., genetic rescue; Frankham 2015; Whiteley et al. 2015). The potential risks and benefits of assisted gene flow have been discussed in the literature, and an emerging...
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