This guest post is by Gavin Douglas (@gmdougla), Stephen Wright (@stepheniwright), and Tanja Slotte (@tanjaslotte) on their paper Douglas et al. Hybrid origins and the earliest stages of diploidization in the highly successful recent polyploid Capsella bursa-pastoris. bioRxived here.

In this preprint we investigate the mode of origin and evolutionary consequences of polyploidy in the highly successful tetraploid plant Capsella bursa-pastoris. We analyze high-coverage massively parallel genomic sequence data and first show that C. bursa-pastoris is a recent hybrid of two Capsella lineages leading to C. grandiflora and C. orientalis. This settles a long-standing uncertainty regarding the origins of C. bursa-pastoris. Second, we investigate patterns of nonfunctionalization and gene loss, and while we find little evidence for rapid, massive genome-wide fractionation, our analyses suggest that there is a decrease in the efficacy of selection in this recently formed tetraploid.

Allopolyploid origins of Capsella bursa-pastoris

Determining the evolutionary origin of C. bursa-pastoris has proven to be difficult and many contradictory hypotheses have been suggested, including that the tetraploid is an autopolyploid of a single Capsella species. Part of the complication has been the relatively low levels of sequence divergence between homeologous gene copies, and across the diploid Capsella lineages. Given population genomic sequences from all three Capsella species mentioned, we were able to address this question again with several different approaches.
C. bursa-pastoris undergoes disomic inheritance, meaning that genes duplicated as a result of polyploidy (homeologs) are independently inherited. Thus, one of the major tasks with our genomic data was to partition out the sequences from the two homeologous subgenomes. Because of the low levels of sequence divergence between homeologs (3% on average), this can be a challenging task. We took two approaches to generate phased genome sequence for inferring species origins; de novo assembly of short reads and phasing of SNPs from mapping reads to the reference genome of the diploid Capsella rubella. Phylogenetic trees generated from de novo assemblies of these species overwhelmingly support one C. bursa-pastoris homeolog forming a clade with C. grandiflora and the other with C. orientalis. The distribution of SNPs and transposable elements shared between these species also strongly support this hybridization model, which we estimate occurred within the last 100-300,000 years.
One reason the hybrid origins of C. bursa-pastoris is exciting is due to the divergent evolution of its progenitor lineages. C. orientalis and C. grandiflora differ both in their mating system and geographical distribution. Given that C. bursa-pastoris is a highly successful weed found worldwide, it will be interesting in future work to assess whether this divergence between the C. orientalis and C. grandiflora lineages contributed to the tetraploid’s adaptability.

Decreased efficacy of selection in the recently arisen polyploid
Following genome duplications the majority of redundant loci are expected to become lost over time through the process of diploidization. This model has been supported by several ancient polyploid events, including in Arabidopsis. Capsella bursa-pastoris presents an interesting model for studying the early phases of diploidization, and allows for an investigation of the rate of gene loss as well as the relative importance of relaxed selection vs. positive selection during early stages of gene inactivation. We searched for large deletions spanning genes using several approaches both based on determination of exact breakpoints and by cross-referencing low-coverage regions in C. bursa-pastoris with other Capsella species. Although we identified proportionately more large deletions segregating in C. bursa-pastoris than in the diploids, we did not find evidence for massive genomic changes in the tetraploid.
We were able to demonstrate relaxation of selection by analyzing the site frequency spectrum of SNPs segregating at 0-fold nonsynonymous sites in the three Capsella species. We also investigated SNPs causing putatively deleterious effects, such as premature stop codons, segregating in the three Capsella. Many of these SNPs are shared between the three species, although segregating at low frequencies in C. grandiflora. Since this shared deleterious variation inherited from progenitors seems to be responsible for a large proportion of the earliest stages of gene degeneration, this data supports a model of genome fractionation that is given a “head start” from standing variation. A key message following from this result is that we should be giving more weight to purely historical explanations of gene loss when studying biased fractionation.