Comparative population genetics of mimetic Heliconius butterflies in an endangered habitat; Brazil's Atlantic Forest

BMC Genetics

Research Article

Márcio Z Cardoso¹  Swee-Peck Quek²  Marcus R Kronforst²  Priscila Albuquerque de Moura³ 

[1] Departamento de Botânica, Ecologia e Zoologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, RN, Brazil;FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA;Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, RN, Brazil;

关键词: Genetic Differentiation;    Habitat Fragmentation;    Population Genetic Structure;    Population Connectivity;    Wing Pattern;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2156-12-9

 received in 2010-11-12, accepted in 2011-01-20,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBrazil's Atlantic Forest is a biodiversity hotspot endangered by severe habitat degradation and fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation is expected to reduce dispersal among habitat patches resulting in increased genetic differentiation among populations. Here we examined genetic diversity and differentiation among populations of two Heliconius butterfly species in the northern portion of Brazil's Atlantic Forest to estimate the potential impact of habitat fragmentation on population connectivity in butterflies with home-range behavior.ResultsWe generated microsatellite, AFLP and mtDNA sequence data for 136 Heliconius erato specimens from eight collecting locations and 146 H. melpomene specimens from seven locations. Population genetic analyses of the data revealed high levels of genetic diversity in H. erato relative to H. melpomene, widespread genetic differentiation among populations of both species, and no evidence for isolation-by-distance.ConclusionsThese results are consistent with the hypothesis that the extensive habitat fragmentation along Brazil's Atlantic Forest has reduced dispersal of Heliconius butterflies among neighboring habitat patches. The results also lend support to the observation that fine-scale population genetic structure may be common in Heliconius. If such population structure also exists independent of human activity, and has been common over the evolutionary history of Heliconius butterflies, it may have contributed to the evolution of wing pattern diversity in the genus.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Albuquerque de Moura et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.