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The genus Quercus, which emerged ~55 million years ago during globally warm temperatures, diversified into ~450 species. We present a high-quality de novo genome assembly of a California endemic oak, Quercus lobata, revealing features consistent with oak evolutionary success. Effective population size remained large throughout history despite declining since the early Miocene. Analysis of 39,373 mapped protein-coding genes outlined copious duplications consistent with genetic and phenotypic diversity, both by retention of genes created during the ancient γ whole genome hexaploid duplication event and by tandem duplication within families, including the numerous resistance genes and also unexpected candidate genes for an incompatibility system involving multiple non-self-recognition genes. An additional surprising finding is that subcontext-specific patterns of DNA methylation associated with transposable elements reveal broadly-distributed heterochromatin in intergenic regions, similar to grasses (another highly successful taxon). Collectively, these features promote genetic and phenotypic variation that would facilitate adaptability to changing environments. more...

The eastern North American white oaks, a complex of approximately 16 potentially interbreeding species, have become a classic model for studying the genetic nature of species in a syngameon. Genetic work over the past two decades has demonstrated the reality of oak species, but gene flow between sympatric oaks raises the question of whether there are conserved regions of the genome that define oak species. Does gene flow homogenize the entire genome? Do the regions of the genome that distinguish a species in one part of its range differ from the regions that distinguish it in other parts of its range, where it grows in sympatry with different species? Or are there regions of the genome that are relatively conserved across species ranges? In this study, we revisit seven species of the eastern North American white oak syngameon using a set of 80 SNPs selected in a previous study because they show differences among, and consistency within, the species. We test the hypothesis that there exist segments of the genome that do not become homogenized by repeated introgression, but retain distinct alleles characteristic of each species. We undertake a rangewide sampling to investigate whether SNPs that appeared to be fixed based on a relatively small sample in our previous work are fixed or nearly fixed across the range of the species. Each of the seven species remains genetically distinct across its range, given our diagnostic set of markers, with relatively few individuals exhibiting admixture of multiple species. SNPs map back to all 12Quercuslinkage groups (chromosomes) and are separated from each other by an average of 7.47 million base pairs (± 8.74 million bp, s.d.), but are significantly clustered relative to a random null distribution, suggesting that our SNP toolkit reflects genome-wide patterns of divergence while potentially being concentrated in regions of the genome that reflect a higher-than-average history of among-species divergence. This application of a DNA toolkit designed for the simple problem of identifying species in the field has an important implication: the eastern North American white oak syngameon is composed of entities that most taxonomists would consider “good species,” and species in the syngameon retain their genetic cohesion because characteristic portions of the genome do not become homogenized despite a history of introgression. more...