Comparative Analyses of Four Reference Genomes Reveal Exceptional Diversity and Weak Linked Selection in the Yellow Monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus) Complex.

Yellow monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus complex, Phrymaceae) are a powerful system for studying ecological adaptation, reproductive variation, and genome evolution. To initiate pan-genomics in this group, we present four chromosome-scale assemblies and annotations of accessions spanning a broad evolutionary spectrum: two from a single M. guttatus population, one from the closely related selfing species M. nasutus, and one from a more divergent species M. tilingii. All assemblies are highly complete and resolve centromeric and repetitive regions. Comparative analyses reveal such extensive structural variation in repeat-rich, gene-poor regions that large portions of the genome are unalignable across accessions. As a result, this Mimulus pan-genome is primarily informative in genic regions, underscoring limitations of resequencing approaches in such polymorphic taxa. We document gene presence-absence, investigate the recombination landscape using high-resolution linkage data, and quantify nucleotide diversity. Surprisingly, pairwise differences at fourfold synonymous sites are exceptionally high-even in regions of very low recombination-reaching ~3.2% within a single M. guttatus population, ~7% within the interfertile M. guttatus species complex (approximately equal to SNP divergence between great apes and Old World monkeys), and ~7.4% between that complex and the reproductively isolated M. tilingii. Genome-wide patterns of nucleotide variation show little evidence of linked selection, and instead suggest that the concentration of genes (and likely selected sites) in high-recombination regions may buffer diversity loss. These assemblies, annotations, and comparative analyses provide a robust genomic foundation for Mimulus research and offer new insights into the interplay of recombination, structural variation, and molecular evolution in highly diverse plant genomes.

Duke Scholars

Author John H. Willis Biology