Biodiversity Genomics Fellow The George Washington University Washington, District of Columbia
Organisms have frequently been artificially selected for unusual colour patterns and phenotypes, and occasionally this may also lead to the fixation of otherwise-deleterious mutations in captive populations. A greenhouse population of Heliconius butterflies recently started producing pale or white morphs, which are never observed in the wild, and cannot fly or reproduce. Here, by resequencing a set of related individuals and performing autozygosity mapping, association analyses, and comparison to Heliconius population data, I identified a large deletion that removes the promoter of a previously-described patterning gene, cortex. This deletion joins 40 other examples of allelic variants that provide heterozygous advantage in domesticated animals due to artificial selection by fanciers and breeders, in spite of undesirable effects in the homozygous state.
