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Genome-wide association analysis reveals polymorphic short tandem repeats linked to climate adaptation in Marchantia polymorpha, indicating repeat variation captures adaptive signals missed by SNPs.
Natural populations of Marchantia polymorpha sampled across contrasting climatic regions show clear geographic differentiation between Europe and Japan based on polymorphic short tandem repeat (STR) variation. Genome-wide association (GWAS) analyses identified pSTR loci whose repeat-length variation tracks temperature-related WorldClim variables. pSTR-based GWAS further detected potential adaptive loci that were not captured by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based GWAS, demonstrating that repeat variation can complement or reveal signals missed by SNPs. Because M. polymorpha has a dominant haploid life stage, STR alleles are directly exposed to selection, highlighting repeat variation as a visible and selectable genetic state that may contribute to local climate adaptation.
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Wu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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