{"doi":"10.1038/s41598-021-92385-8","title":"Genome-enabled discovery of evolutionary divergence in brains and behavior","abstract":"Lake Malawi cichlid fishes exhibit extensive divergence in form and function built from a relatively small number of genetic changes. We compared the genomes of rock- and sand-dwelling species and asked which genetic variants differed among the groups. We found that 96% of differentiated variants reside in non-coding sequence but these non-coding diverged variants are evolutionarily conserved. Genome regions near differentiated variants are enriched for craniofacial, neural and behavioral categories. Following leads from genome sequence, we used rock- vs. sand-species and their hybrids to (i) delineate the push-pull roles of BMP signaling and irx1b in the specification of forebrain territories during gastrulation and (ii) reveal striking context-dependent brain gene expression during adult social behavior. Our results demonstrate how divergent genome sequences can predict differences in key evolutionary traits. We highlight the promise of evolutionary reverse genetics-the inference of phenotypic divergence from unbiased genome sequencing and then empirical validation in natural populations.","journal":"Scientific Reports","year":2021,"id":183317,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":13,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.931,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":585180,"name":"Jonathan B. Sylvester","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":585181,"name":"Kawther Abdilleh","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":585182,"name":"Michael Norsworthy","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":584656,"name":"Karen Pottin","orcid":"0000-0001-9491-4660","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":550064,"name":"Milan Malinsky","orcid":"0000-0002-1462-6317","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":584657,"name":"Ryan F. Bloomquist","orcid":"0000-0003-3514-8593","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":374256,"name":"Zachary V. Johnson","orcid":"0000-0002-0101-6309","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":293934,"name":"Patrick T. McGrath","orcid":"0000-0002-1598-3746","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":374258,"name":"J. Todd Streelman","orcid":"0000-0003-0057-5069","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":584655,"name":"Chinar Patil","orcid":"0000-0003-4510-4084","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":95,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:48:17.816498Z","pmid":"34155279","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}