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A large close relative of C. elegans is slow-developing but not long-lived.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Variation in body size is thought to be a major driver of a wide variety of ecological and evolutionary patterns, including changes in development, reproduction, and longevity. Additionally, drastic changes in natural context often have profound effects on multiple fitness-related traits. Caenorhabditis inopinata is a recently-discovered fig-associated nematode that is unusually large relative to other members of the genus, including the closely related model system C. elegans. Here we test whether the dramatic increase in body size and shift in ecological context has led to correlated changes in key life history and developmental parameters within this species. RESULTS:Using four developmental milestones, C. inopinata was found to have a slower rate of development than C. elegans across a range of temperatures. Despite this, C. inopinata did not reveal any differences in adult lifespan from C. elegans after accounting for differences in developmental timing and reproductive mode. C. inopinata fecundity was generally lower than that of C. elegans, but fitness improved under continuous-mating, consistent with sperm-limitation under gonochoristic (male/female) reproduction. C. inopinata also revealed greater fecundity and viability at higher temperatures. CONCLUSION:Consistent with observations in other ectotherms, slower growth in C. inopinata indicates a potential trade-off between body size and developmental timing, whereas its unchanged lifespan suggests that longevity is largely uncoupled from its increase in body size. Additionally, temperature-dependent patterns of fitness in C. inopinata are consistent with its geographic origins in subtropical Okinawa. Overall, these results underscore the extent to which changes in ecological context and body size can shape life history traits.

SUBMITTER: Woodruff GC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6416856 | biostudies-other | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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A large close relative of C. elegans is slow-developing but not long-lived.

Woodruff Gavin C GC Johnson Erik E Phillips Patrick C PC

BMC evolutionary biology 20190311 1

<h4>Background</h4>Variation in body size is thought to be a major driver of a wide variety of ecological and evolutionary patterns, including changes in development, reproduction, and longevity. Additionally, drastic changes in natural context often have profound effects on multiple fitness-related traits. Caenorhabditis inopinata is a recently-discovered fig-associated nematode that is unusually large relative to other members of the genus, including the closely related model system C. elegans ...[more]

PMID: 30866802

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Project description:The abundance, diversity, and genomic distribution of repetitive elements is highly variable among species. These patterns are thought to be driven in part by reproductive mode and the interaction of selection and recombination, and recombination rates typically vary by chromosomal position. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, repetitive elements are enriched at chromosome arms and depleted on centers, and this mirrors the chromosomal distributions of other genomic features such as recombination rate. How conserved is this genomic landscape of repeats, and what evolutionary forces maintain it? To address this, we compared the genomic organization of repetitive elements across five Caenorhabditis species with chromosome-level assemblies. As previously reported, repeat content is enriched on chromosome arms in most Caenorhabditis species, and no obvious patterns of repeat content associated with reproductive mode were observed. However, the fig-associated C. inopinata has experienced repetitive element expansion and reveals no association of global repeat density with chromosome position. Patterns of repeat superfamily specific distributions reveal this global pattern is driven largely by a few repeat superfamilies that in C. inopinata have expanded in number and have weak associations with chromosome position. Additionally, 15% of predicted protein-coding genes in C. inopinata align to transposon-related proteins. When these are excluded, C. inopinata has no enrichment of genes in chromosome centers, in contrast to its close relatives who all have such clusters. Forward evolutionary simulations reveal that chromosomal heterogeneity in recombination rate alone can generate structured repetitive genomic landscapes when insertions are weakly deleterious, whereas chromosomal heterogeneity in the fitness effects of transposon insertion can promote such landscapes across a variety of evolutionary scenarios. Thus, patterns of gene density along chromosomes likely contribute to global repetitive landscapes in this group, although other historical or genomic factors are needed to explain the idiosyncrasy of genomic organization of various transposable element taxa within C. inopinata. Taken together, these results highlight the power of comparative genomics and evolutionary simulations in testing hypotheses regarding the causes of genome organization.

Dataset Information

A large close relative of C. elegans is slow-developing but not long-lived.

Publications

A large close relative of C. elegans is slow-developing but not long-lived.

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