Genomics Islands in the Caribbean Sea

Oscar Puebla 
GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany - oscar.puebla@mail.mcgill.ca

(Seminar in English)

Recent evolutionary radiations such as Darwin’s finches, East African cichlids or Heliconius butterflies have served as model systems to understand how novel variation and new species arise. These systems, clearly in the early stages of divergence, have stimulated research into the behavioral, ecological, and genetic bases of reproductive isolation that have arguably transformed our understanding of the origins of biodiversity. However, no analogous radiation comes to mind in the largest ecosystem on earth, the ocean. The hamlets (Hypoplectrus spp, Serranidae), simultaneously hermaphroditic reef fishes from the wider Caribbean, provide a marine equivalent to the classic terrestrial and freshwater radiations that promises to promote our understanding of adaptive evolution in the oceans. I will present natural selection, sexual selection and genomic hypotheses for speciation in the hamlets, including the yet unpublished hamlet genome complemented with large-scale resequencing analysis of a subset of species.

Recent publications:

Theodosiou L, McMillan WO, Puebla O (2016) Recombination in the eggs and sperm in a simultaneously hermaphroditic vertebrate. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283: 20161821.

Picq S, McMillan WO, Puebla O (2016) Population genomics of local adaptation versus speciation in coral reef fishes (Hypoplectrus spp, Serranidae). Ecology and Evolution 6, 2109– 2124.

Puebla O, Bermingham E, McMillan WO (2014) Genomic atolls of divergence in coral reef fishes (Hypoplectrus spp, Serranidae). Molecular Ecology 23, 5291– 5303.