Ricardo Medina just led us through the publication of one of his master’s thesis chapters as a new paper in Molecular Ecology focused on populations of Boana platanura distributed along a steep environmental gradient in the Colombian Andes. We analyzed the relationships between environmentally (temperature and precipitation) associated genetic and phenotypic differentiation and the potential drivers of isolation by environment along the elevation gradient, and identified candidate SNPs associated with temperature and body size, which follow a clinal pattern of genome-wide differentiation tightly coupled with phenotypic variation: as elevation increases, B. platanera exhibits larger body size and longer call duration with more pulses but lower pulse rate and frequency. Thus, the environmental landscape has rendered a scenario where isolation by environment and candidate loci show concordance with phenotypic divergence in this tropical frog along an elevation gradient.
Here is the early view citation and a link
Medina, R., Wogan, G. O. U., Bi, K., Termignoni-García, F., Bernal, M. H., Jaramillo-Correa, J. P., Wang, I. J., & Vázquez-Domínguez, E. (2021). Phenotypic and genomic diversification with isolation by environment along elevational gradients in a neotropical treefrog. Molecular Ecology, 00, 1– 15.