Parallel adaptation to geothermally-warmed habitats due to common structural variation and functional developmental pathways
Matthew K. Brachmann, Ana P. B. Costa, Shaun Robertson, Bethany Smith, Kate Donoghue, Natalie Pilakouta, Mark Whitehead, Xuan Liu, Bjarni Kristjánsson, Skúli Skúlason, Colin Selman, Kevin Parsons · 2026
Read Parallel adaptation to geothermally-warmed habitats due to common structural variation and functional developmental pathways by Matthew K. Brachmann, Ana P. B. Costa, Shaun Robertson, Bethany Smith, Kate Donoghue, Natalie Pilakouta, Mark Whitehead, Xuan Liu, Bjarni Kristjánsson, Skúli Skúlason, Colin Selman, Kevin Parsons (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13598157.txt.
Description
Matthew K. Brachmann leads a twelve-author study of threespine stickleback fish that independently colonized geothermally warmed waters, using them as a living preview of climate warming. Pairs of warm-adapted and ordinary populations were compared for body traits and genomes in their 2026 analysis.
The warm fish converged in behavior and body: similar appetite, fat stores, and fat loss during starvation. Their genomes, though, diverged at mostly different loci, a non-parallel pattern, except for one shared chromosome inversion tied to metabolic genes. At the functional level the same signaling pathway, the mapk cascade, shifted across pairs, and its genes responded to temperature and to cross-breeding. The authors conclude that selection finds similar outcomes through different genetic routes, so conservation planning should protect functional pathways rather than betting on particular alleles.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Matthew K. Brachmann, Ana P. B. Costa, Shaun Robertson, Bethany Smith, Kate Donoghue, Natalie Pilakouta, Mark Whitehead, Xuan Liu, Bjarni Kristjánsson, Skúli Skúlason, Colin Selman, Kevin Parsons |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 72706 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |