The evolutionary dynamics of genetic mutational load throughout tomato
domestication history
Abstract
Understanding the impact of domestication on deleterious mutations has
fascinated evolutionary biologists and breeders alike. A “cost of
domestication” has been reported for some organisms through
accumulation of gene disruptions or radical amino acid changes. However,
recent evidence paints a more complex picture of this phenomenon in
different domesticated species. In this study, we used genomic sequences
of 253 tomato accessions to investigate the evolution of deleterious
mutations and genomic structural variants (SVs) through tomato
domestication history. We apply phylogeny-based methods to identify
deleterious mutations in the cultivated tomato as well as its semi-wild
and wild relatives. Our results implicate a downward trend throughout
domestication in the number of genetic variants, regardless of their
functional impact. This suggests that demographic factors have reduced
overall genetic diversity, leading to lower deleterious load and SVs as
well as loss of some beneficial alleles during tomato domestication.
However, we detected an increase in proportions of nonsynonymous and
deleterious alleles (relative to synonymous and neutral nonsynonymous
alleles, respectively) during the initial stage of tomato domestication
in Ecuador. Additionally, deleterious alleles in fully cultivated tomato
seem to be more frequent than expected under a neutral hypothesis of
molecular evolution. Our analyses also revealed frequent deleterious
alleles in several well-studied tomato genes, probably involved in
response to biotic and abiotic stress as well as fruit development and
flavor regulation. To provide a practical guide for breeding
experiments, we created TomDel, a public searchable database of 21,162
deleterious alleles identified in this study (hosted on the Solanaceae
Genomic Network; https://solgenomics.net/).