Local adaptation (mostly) remains local: reassessing environmental associations of climate-related candidate SNPs in Arabidopsis halleri

Numerous landscape genomic studies have identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes potentially involved in local adaptation. Rarely, it has been explicitly evaluated whether these environmental associations also hold true beyond the populations studied. We tested whether putatively adaptive SNPs in Arabidopsis halleri (Brassicaceae), characterized in a previous study investigating local adaptation to a highly heterogeneous environment, show the same environmental associations in an independent, geographically enlarged set of 18 populations. We analysed new SNP data of 444 plants with the same methodology (partial Mantel tests, PMTs) as in the original study and additionally with a latent factor mixed model (LFMM) approach. Of the 74 candidate SNPs, 41% (PMTs) and 51% (LFMM) were associated with environmental factors in the independent data set. However, only 5% (PMTs) and 15% (LFMM) of the associations showed the same environment–allele relationships as in the original ..., nSSR and SNP genotypesnSSR and SNP genotypesrellstab_raw_data.xlsx, ,