Gene expression is implicated in the ability of pikas to occupy Himalayan elevational gradient

Katherine A Solari; Uma Ramakrishnan; Elizabeth A Hadly

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0207936

Gene expression is implicated in the ability of pikas to occupy Himalayan elevational gradient

PLoS One. 2018 Dec 12;13(12):e0207936. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207936. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Katherine A Solari^{1

2}, Uma Ramakrishnan^{3

4}, Elizabeth A Hadly^{1

2

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
² Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
³ National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bangalore, India.
⁴ Program for Conservation Genomics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
⁵ Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.

Abstract

Species are shifting their ranges due to climate change, many moving to cooler and higher locations. However, with elevation increase comes oxygen decline, potentially limiting a species' ability to track its environment depending on what mechanisms it has available to compensate for hypoxic stress. Pikas (Family Ochotonidae), cold-specialist small mammal species, are already undergoing elevational range shifts. We collected RNA samples from one population of Ochotona roylei in the western Himalaya at three sites- 3,600, 4,000, and 5,000 meters-and found no evidence of significant population genetic structure nor positive selection among sites. However, out of over 10,000 expressed transcripts, 26 were significantly upregulated at the 5,000 m site and were significantly enriched for pathways consistent with physiological compensation for limited oxygen. These results suggest that differences in gene expression may play a key role in enabling hypoxia tolerance on this local scale, indicating elevational flexibility that may facilitate successful range shifts in response to climate change.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Altitude
Animals
Climate Change
Ecosystem
Gene Expression / genetics
Genetics, Population / methods
Hypoxia / genetics*
India
Lagomorpha / genetics*
Oxygen / metabolism
Tibet

Substances

Oxygen

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Stanford University; The Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (awarded to KAS; https://cehg.stanford.edu/); The National Center for Biological Sciences; the Stanford Professor Gilda H. Loew Fellowship (awarded to KAS); and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum Research Internship in Science and Engineering (awarded to KAS; http://www.iusstf.org/program/research-internships-in-science--engineering). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.