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Jack Rayner

@jackrayner.bsky.social

104 followers 312 following 4 posts

Jack Rayner @jackrayner.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

These crickets are targeted by a parasitoid fly that is attracted to their song. We found fly attack rates vary across populations which influences allelic variation in the region underlying a protective male-silencing 'curly-wing' phenotype. Also, these crickets give birth to a new type of ant

Plots showing: A,B) fly attack rate varies across cricket populations; C,D) genomic regions underlying common male-silencing phenotypes, flatwing and curly-wing; E) evidence of fly attack rate influencing allelic variation at multiple sites in the genome, most notably in the genomic regions underlying the curly-wing phenotype.

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Jack Rayner @jackrayner.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

A finding we didn't anticipate is that these small, fragmented populations share many large/very large structural variants - presumably inversions, presumably influenced by balancing selection. We don't know what their phenotypic consequences are, but they have substantial effects on gene expression

Plots showing discrete genetic linkage and clustering of samples in PCA across several chromosomes of the cricket's genome, supporting the presence of several very large structural variants

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