GENOME-WIDE SNP ANALYSIS FOR ASSESSING GENETIC DIVERSITY AND ADAPTIVE TRAITS IN CLIMATE-RESILIENT SPECIES

Abstract

Climatic change is putting much strain on species survival that needs to be clearly understood in terms of genetic diversity as well as adaptive mechanisms on the genomic level. The proposed research will conduct a genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis in order to evaluate the genetic diversity and determine the adaptive characteristics to climate resilience in the target species. There were 240 sampled individuals sampled in six ecologically differentiated populations and high throughput sequencing yielded around 128,450, high quality SNps following strict filtering (minor allele frequency> 0.05, missing rate < 10%). The genetic diversity analysis demonstrated that there was moderate and high variability, and heterozygosis (Ho) was the value between 0.32 and 0.47 with the mean nucleotide diversity (0.036). The principal component analysis (PCA) and ADMIXTURE showed population structure showed definite genetic clustering with regard to environmental variations and pairwise values of FST were found to lie between 0.08 and 0.21, indicating moderate genetic differentiation. The analysis of genome-wide association revealed 37 SNP loci which contain significant SNPs (p < 0.001, corrected by the FDR) based on the main traits that affect a type of adaptation, including drought tolerance, tolerance to temperature, and response to salinity. It is important to note that the enrichment of candidate genes associated with stress response pathways such as heat shock proteins, osmotic regulation genes etc., were significantly enriched. Such results indicate that genome-wide SNP analysis can be used to offer sound information on genetic diversity and adaptive evolution with an attractive implication on conservation and breeding programmes that may withstand climate change.