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Creators/Authors contains: "Ridenbaugh, Ryan_D"

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  1. Abstract Rapidly evolving taxa are excellent models for understanding the mechanisms that give rise to biodiversity. However, developing an accurate historical framework for comparative analysis of such lineages remains a challenge due to ubiquitous incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and introgression. Here, we use a whole-genome alignment, multiple locus-sampling strategies, and summary-tree and single nucleotide polymorphism-based species-tree methods to infer a species tree for eastern North American Neodiprion species, a clade of pine-feeding sawflies (Order: Hymenopteran; Family: Diprionidae). We recovered a well-supported species tree that—except for three uncertain relationships—was robust to different strategies for analyzing whole-genome data. Nevertheless, underlying gene-tree discordance was high. To understand this genealogical variation, we used multiple linear regression to model site concordance factors estimated in 50-kb windows as a function of several genomic predictor variables. We found that site concordance factors tended to be higher in regions of the genome with more parsimony-informative sites, fewer singletons, less missing data, lower GC content, more genes, lower recombination rates, and lower D-statistics (less introgression). Together, these results suggest that ILS, introgression, and genotyping error all shape the genomic landscape of gene-tree discordance in Neodiprion. More generally, our findings demonstrate how combining phylogenomic analysis with knowledge of local genomic features can reveal mechanisms that produce topological heterogeneity across genomes. 
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  2. Abstract Understanding the genetics of adaptation and speciation is critical for a complete picture of how biodiversity is generated and maintained. Heterogeneous genomic differentiation between diverging taxa is commonly documented, with genomic regions of high differentiation interpreted as resulting from differential gene flow, linked selection and reduced recombination rates. Disentangling the roles of each of these non‐exclusive processes in shaping genome‐wide patterns of divergence is challenging but will enhance our knowledge of the repeatability of genomic landscapes across taxa. Here, we combine whole‐genome resequencing and genome feature data to investigate the processes shaping the genomic landscape of differentiation for a sister‐species pair of haplodiploid pine sawflies,Neodiprion leconteiandNeodiprion pinetum. We find genome‐wide correlations between genome features and summary statistics are consistent with pervasive linked selection, with patterns of diversity and divergence more consistently predicted by exon density and recombination rate than the neutral mutation rate (approximated by dS). We also find that both global and local patterns ofFST,dXYandπprovide strong support for recurrent selection as the primary selective process shaping variation across pine sawfly genomes, with some contribution from balancing selection and lineage‐specific linked selection. Because inheritance patterns for haplodiploid genomes are analogous to those of sex chromosomes, we hypothesize that haplodiploids may be especially prone to recurrent selection, even if gene flow occurred throughout divergence. Overall, our study helps fill an important taxonomic gap in the genomic landscape literature and contributes to our understanding of the processes that shape genome‐wide patterns of genetic variation. 
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