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Dryad

Reference genome resources associated with the project: Functional genetic diversity is correlated with intensity of genetic drift in populations of an endangered rattlesnake

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Oct 02, 2023 version files 3.89 GB

Abstract

Theory predicts that genetic erosion in small, isolated populations of endangered species can be assessed using estimates of neutral genetic variation reflecting long-term impacts of genetic drift, yet this widely used approach has been questioned in the genomics era. Here we leverage a chromosome-level assembly and whole genome resequencing data (N=110 individuals) from an endangered rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus) to evaluate the relationship between genome-wide neutral and functional diversity over long- and short-term timescales. As predicted for populations at long-term equilibrium, we found a positive correlation between population-level estimates of neutral genetic diversity (π) and the mean number of highly detrimental loss-of-function mutations, and a negative relationship between neutral genetic diversity and an estimate of genetic load. In contrast, we found only a weak, non-significant positive correlation between levels of neutral and adaptive variation. Additional analyses using estimates of drift at more recent time scales (> 100 generations) show expected correlations between both measures of genetic load, but a lack of a significant correlation with levels of adaptive variation. Individual-based demographic metrics that capture drift impacts over recent time scales confirm these results. Broadly, our results confirm that estimates of diversity and demography based on neutral genetic variation provide an accurate measure of a key component of genetic erosion – genetic load – in populations of a threatened vertebrate. Our findings also provide nuance to the neutral-functional diversity controversy by demonstrating that neutral genetic diversity is useful in predicting some, but not all, components of functional genetic diversity.