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Comparative Transcriptomic Reveals Greater Similarities in Response to Temperature Than to Invasive Alien Predator in the Damselfly Ischnura elegans Across Different Geographic Scales - PubMed

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2024

. 2024 Sep 6;17(9):e70002.

doi: 10.1111/eva.70002. eCollection 2024 Sep.

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Comparative Transcriptomic Reveals Greater Similarities in Response to Temperature Than to Invasive Alien Predator in the Damselfly Ischnura elegans Across Different Geographic Scales

Guillaume Wos et al. Evol Appl. 2024.

Abstract

The impact of global changes on populations may not be necessarily uniform across a species' range. Here, we aim at comparing the phenotypic and transcriptomic response to warming and an invasive predator cue in populations across different geographic scales in the damselfly Ischnura elegans. We collected adult females in two ponds in southern Poland (central latitude) and two ponds in southern Sweden (high latitude). We raised their larvae in growth chambers and exposed them to combination of temperature and a predator cue released by the crayfish Orconectes limosus. When larvae reached the prefinal larval stage, they were phenotyped for traits related to growth and size and collected for a gene expression analysis. High-latitude populations exhibited greater phenotypic and transcriptomic variation than central-latitude populations. Across latitudes and ponds, temperature generally increased growth rate and the predator cue decreased mass, but the effects of temperature were also pond-specific. Comparison of the transcriptomic profiles revealed a greater overlap in the response to temperature across latitudes and ponds, especially for pathway-related oxidative stress and sugar and lipid metabolism. The transcriptomic response to a predator cue and to the interaction temperature × predator cue was more pond-specific and overlapped only for few genes and pathways related to cuticle, development and signal transduction. We demonstrated that central- and high-latitude populations may partially respond through similar mechanisms to warming and, to a lower extent to a predator cue and to the interaction temperature × predator cue. For the predator cue and the interaction, the large fraction of ponds-specific genes suggests local adaptation. We show that high-latitude populations were generally more plastic at the phenotypic and transcriptomic level and may be more capable to cope with environmental changes than their central-latitude counterparts.

Keywords: Ischnura elegans; comparative transcriptomics; gene expression; global warming; intraspecific variation; invasive alien species.

© 2024 The Author(s). Evolutionary Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1

Map showing the sampled ponds depicted by coloured squares in Sweden (high latitude; blue colours) and Poland (central latitude; red colours). Larvae from field‐collected females were raised in incubators under different temperature (20°C vs. 24°C) and predator (absence vs. presence of predator cue) treatment. Geographic distribution of I. elegans is shown in grey (Dijkstra and Schröter 2020), and occurrence of the spiny‐cheek crayfish O. limosus (Kouba, Petrusek, and Kozák 2014) is depicted by red crosses. On the left side is presented principal component analysis (PCA) plots based on the phenotypic data showing differences in the four phenotypic variables between ponds and temperature (upper plot) and ponds and predator cue (lower plot). On the right side is presented PCA plots based on the transcriptomic data.

FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2

Boxplots of the median distance between individuals and their centroids for each pond and temperature treatment based on principal component analysis (PCA) plots using (A) the phenotypic and (B) the transcriptomic data. Median and 95% confidence intervals were derived from 1000 bootstraps replicates. Statistics are presented in Table 3.

FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3

Venn diagrams showing the number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in response to (A) temperature, (B) predator cue and (C) interaction temperature × predator cue (T × P) at each latitude and their overlap. The overlap indicates the number of genes differentially expressed in the same direction across the two latitudes. Significance (nonrandom overlap) was assessed using Fisher's exact test.

FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4

Number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the same direction across ponds in response to (A) temperature, (B) predator cue and (C) interaction temperature × predator cue (T × P). On the x‐axis, green dots indicate the ponds being compared and values on the right side indicate the total number of genes affected by each treatment in each pond. Significant overlap across ponds was assessed by Fisher's exact test and is indicated by ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05 and nonsignificant results are indicated by n.s.; detailed results of the tests are presented in Table S7.

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