@genetics-gsa.bsky.social

Thanks to everyone who made this happen! @ahancock.bsky.social + Tom Theeuwen + Pádraic Flood + Paula Avila + Mehmet Göktay + Mark Aarts @mpipz.bsky.social

This new intercross population provides a complementary resource for dissecting the genetics of adaptation — in Cape Verde and potentially beyond.
If you’re interested in trait architecture, island evolution, or multiparent populations, I hope you’ll find it useful. academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

By recombining the two island lineages, we can now study adaptive alleles in a shared background and uncover their effects without the confounding structure of the natural populations.
This gives us a clearer picture of how these populations adapted after colonizing Cape Verde.

We detected major functional variants:
🌼 FLC R3X and FRI K232X — strongly affecting flowering time
🧲 IRT1 G130X — influencing photosynthesis and plant size
➕ Evidence for epistasis
Several of these variants are fixed on one island, so they had been elusive in previous mapping efforts.

We focused on traits likely shaped by Cape Verde’s short growing season and nutrient-poor volcanic soils:
⏱️ Flowering time
🍃 Rosette size
🌿 Photosystem II efficiency (ΦPSII)
These traits connect directly to survival in a tough environment.

So, we developed a new multiparent intercross population to overcome this issue, mix island-specific variants and break up long-range LD —letting us map adaptive variants that natural GWAS panels couldn’t detect and giving us a clearer window into adaptation.

Cape Verde is a fascinating system: two island populations, isolated for thousands of years, each adapting independently to a very harsh environment.
Scientifically this is great — but the extreme population structure means GWAS can’t detect many adaptive variants.

Thank you!