Seascape genetics and evaluation of expression profiles on marine invertebrates on Brazilian Southeast coast

Abstract

Natural population studies considering the effect of environment and geography over the organisms distribution and dispersal capability is the core of landscape genetics. Inferring how the historical relationships between populations are reflected, on the genetic variability is one of the main challenges on the landscape genetics field. This approach allows the understanding of the relationships between geographic distribution and gene flow with the cumulative environmental and bionomics data. The seascape genetics is the field responsible for the understanding of marine communities and their distribution patterns, usuallly limited by "invisible" or unexpected boundaries or geographic barriers. The present proposal aims to evaluate the genetic variability distribution in two marine invertebrate species that inhabit the Southeastern Brazilian rock shores through SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism) analyses. The variation description will be accompanied by the screening of biotic and abiotic data in the collection location and compared to the results obtained by ocean circulation models. Concomitantly, we intend to investigate, in a small scale, if there is differential expression among samples of Littoraria flava to identify potential genes involved on local adaptation. These analyses will allow to identify and annotate genes that have evolutionary shifts in expression that might be correlated with evolutionary changes in morphological, physiological, and developmental characters of interest. (AU)