Figure 1 Schematic illustration of the processes of rapid species adaptation (IMAGE)

_Tokyo Institute of Technology

Figure 1 Schematic illustration of the processes of rapid species adaptation

Caption

Comparison of genomes of three species of Lake Victoria cichlids including Haplochromis chilotes, H. sauvagei, and Lithochromis rufus revealed signs of what biologists call "selective sweep events", in which selective pressures cause a beneficial mutation to rapidly increase its frequency within a population and become present in all members of a species. Furthermore, many of the species-specific alleles appeared to have existed alongside several alternative alleles prior to the adaptive radiation that produced different species of fish.

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Tokyo Tech

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