Divergent evolutionary histories of DNA markers in a Hawaiian population of the coral Montipora capitata

Hollie Putnam; Diane Adams; Ehud Zelzion; Nicole Wagner; Huan Qiu; Tali Mass; Paul Falkowski; Ruth Gates; Debashish Bhattacharya

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2896v1

Divergent evolutionary histories of DNA markers in a Hawaiian population of the coral Montipora capitata

Hollie Putnam^1,2, Diane Adams³, Ehud Zelzion⁴, Nicole Wagner⁴, Huan Qiu⁴, Tali Mass⁵, Paul Falkowski^3,6, Ruth Gates¹, Debashish Bhattacharya ⁴

1 Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe, Hawaii, United States of America

2 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island, United States of America

3 Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America

4 Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America

5 Marine Biology Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

6 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, United States of America

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2896v1

Published: 2017-03-29
Accepted: 2017-03-29

Subject Areas: Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Marine Biology
Keywords: genomics, sperm bundle DNA, coral colonies

Copyright: © 2017 Putnam 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: Putnam H, Adams D, Zelzion E, Wagner N, Qiu H, Mass T, Falkowski P, Gates R, Bhattacharya D. 2017. Divergent evolutionary histories of DNA markers in a Hawaiian population of the coral Montipora capitata. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2896v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2896v1

Abstract

We investigated intra and inter-colony sequence variation in a population of the dominant Hawaiian coral Montipora capitata by analyzing marker gene and genomic data. Ribosomal ITS1 regions showed evidence of a reticulate history among the colonies, suggesting incomplete rDNA repeat homogenization. Analysis of the mitochondrial genome identified a major (M. capitata) and a minor (M. flabellata) haplotype in single polyp-derived sperm bundle DNA with some colonies containing 2-3 different mtDNA haplotypes. In contrast, Pax-C and newly identified single-copy nuclear genes showed either no sequence differences or minor variations in SNP frequencies segregating among the colonies. Our data suggest past mitochondrial introgression in M. capitata, whereas nuclear single-copy loci show limited variation, highlighting the divergent evolutionary histories of these coral DNA markers.