Is there an association between elongation factor 1-α overdominance in the seastar Pisaster ochraceus and “seastar wasting disease”?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Infectious Diseases
- Keywords
- disease, genetic diversity, overdominance, polymorphism, Pacific Ocean, Pisaster ochraceus, seastar
- Copyright
- © 2015 Wares et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Is there an association between elongation factor 1-α overdominance in the seastar Pisaster ochraceus and “seastar wasting disease”? PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1464v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1464v1
Abstract
In recent years, a massive plague has killed millions of seastars, of many different species, along the Pacific coast of North America. This disease, known as 'seastar wasting disease' (SSWD), is thought to be caused by viral infection. In the affected seastar Pisaster ochraceus, previous work had identified that the elongation factor 1-α locus harbored an intronic insertion allele that is lethal when homozygous yet appears to be maintained at moderate frequency in populations through increased fitness for heterozygotes. The environmental conditions supporting this increased fitness are unknown, but overdominance is often associated with disease. Here, we evaluate seastars from 3 regional populations of P. ochraceus to identify the relationship between SSWD and genotype. Although our data suggest that there may be decreased infection or mortality rates in individuals that are heterozygous at this locus, the effect is small and not statistically significant.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ.
Supplemental Information
Supplement S1
Raw genotype data for all three regional collections of Pisaster.