Project description:We found higher substitution rates in cavefish compared with surface fish, in accordance with a smaller cavefish population size which has allowed more rapid fixation of derived alleles present in the ancestral population. This result also implies that the Pachn cave population is much younger than previously estimated. The comparison of these data with simulations suggests that the Pachn cavefish population has probably been underground less than 30,000 years. This new time frame, together with other evidence, indicate that the evolution of cave phenotypes mainly involves the fixation of cryptic genetic variants present in surface fish populations within a short period of time.
Project description:To test wheather cavefish have higher lipogenesis capability than surface fish, we used liver sample from fasted and refed fish to do RNA-seq to compare their transcriptome responding to feeding in surface fish and Pachón cavefish. Moreover, we did the Pparγ ChIP-seq with liver from fed surface fish and Pachón cavefish. We amied to test whether Pparγ in Pachón cavefish have more biding sites and higher binding peaks than surface fish.
