Asymmetric expression patterns reveal a strong maternal effect and dosage compensation in polyploid hybrid fish

Background Hybridization and polyploidization are regarded as the major driving forces in plant speciation, diversification, and ecological adaptation. Our knowledge regarding the mechanisms of duplicated-gene regulation following genomic merging or doubling is primarily derived from plants and is sparse for vertebrates. Results We successfully obtained an F1 generation (including allodiploid hybrids and triploid hybrids) from female Megalobrama amblycephala Yih (BSB, 2n = 48) × male Xenocypri davidi Bleeker (YB, 2n = 48). The duplicated-gene expression patterns of the two types of hybrids were explored using RNA-Seq data. In total, 5.44 × 108 (69.32 GB) clean reads and 499,631 assembled unigenes were obtained from the testis transcriptomes. The sequence similarity analysis of 4265 orthologs revealed that the merged genomes were dominantly expressed in different ploidy hybrids. The differentially expressed genes in the two types of hybrids were asymmetric compared with those in both parents. Furthermore, the genome-wide expression level dominance (ELD) was biased toward the maternal BSB genome in both the allodiploid and triploid hybrids. In addition, the dosage-compensation mechanisms that reduced the triploid expression levels to the diploid state were determined in the triploid hybrids. Conclusions Our results indicate that divergent genomes undergo strong interactions and domination in allopolyploid offspring. Genomic merger has a greater effect on the gene-expression patterns than genomic doubling. The various expression mechanisms (including maternal effect and dosage compensation) in different ploidy hybrids suggest that the initial genomic merger and doubling play important roles in polyploidy adaptation and evolution. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-4883-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.