07/29/2021
I have a bit of fun and exciting news to post. Before I get to that, make sure you swipe right to see awesome poison frogs (all in the genus Ranitomeya)! We just had a paper come out that details the majority of my work during my first postdoc (and some from my PhD). One of the coolest frog species in the world is the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator). This species has evolved to look similar to a number of other congeneric species throughout Peru. Some of our previous work classified this as a mutually-beneficial example of Mullerian mimicry, in which all the species with a shared phenotype gain protection from predators that know to avoid a particular phenotype. But, what genetic mechanisms do these different species use to produce the same appearance?We were curious how different poison frog species produced the same mimetic phenotypes.
What did we do?
First, and arguably most cool, we produced a genome for the mimic poison frog. This genome is a whopping 6.8 Gbp long. For reference, this is almost 3x the length of the human genome! As it turns out, in addition to being really big, poison frog genomes are just loaded with these really long sections of DNA that are repeated a ridiculous number of times and strewn throughout the genome. The combination of the two of these things make assembling poison frog genomes a huge challenge.
Second, we collected gene expression data from 4 morphs of the mimic poison frog and 2 morphs each of Ranitomeya fantastica and variabilis. We then compared how their gene expression patterns tracked over time and between morphs of the species.
What did we find?
Well, first off...we found out that poison frog genomes are ridiculously hard to assemble. This project turned out to be a MASSIVE challenge, but in the end we did the dang thing. Second, we did not find evidence that these different species of frogs used similar gene expression patterns to produce similar appearances. We were pretty surprised about this!
The paper is open access and free for anyone to read. If you don't want to read it, just enjoy these awesome images of poison frogs instead!
