Emergence of a floral colour polymorphism by pollinator-mediated overdominance

Roman T. Kellenberger (), Kelsey J. R. P. Byers, Rita M. De Brito Francisco, Yannick M. Staedler, Amy M. LaFountain, Jürg Schönenberger, Florian P. Schiestl and Philipp M. Schlüter ()
Additional contact information
Roman T. Kellenberger: University of Zurich
Kelsey J. R. P. Byers: University of Zurich
Rita M. De Brito Francisco: University of Zurich
Yannick M. Staedler: University of Vienna
Amy M. LaFountain: University of Connecticut
Jürg Schönenberger: University of Vienna
Florian P. Schiestl: University of Zurich
Philipp M. Schlüter: University of Zurich

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Maintenance of polymorphism by overdominance (heterozygote advantage) is a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology. In most examples known in nature, overdominance is a result of homozygotes suffering from deleterious effects. Here we show that overdominance maintains a non-deleterious polymorphism with black, red and white floral morphs in the Alpine orchid Gymnadenia rhellicani. Phenotypic, metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses reveal that the morphs differ solely in cyanidin pigments, which are linked to differential expression of an anthocyanidin synthase (ANS) gene. This expression difference is caused by a premature stop codon in an ANS-regulating R2R3-MYB transcription factor, which is heterozygous in the red colour morph. Furthermore, field observations show that bee and fly pollinators have opposite colour preferences; this results in higher fitness (seed set) of the heterozygous morph without deleterious effects in either homozygous morph. Together, these findings demonstrate that genuine overdominance exists in nature.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07936-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-07936-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07936-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().