Genome-wide analysis of colonization history and concomitant selection in Arabidopsis lyrata

The high climatic variability in the past hundred thousand years has affected the demographic and adaptive processes in many species, especially in boreal and temperate regions undergoing glacial cycles. This has also influenced the patterns of genome-wide nucleotide variation, but the details of these effects are largely unknown. Here we study the patterns of genome-wide variation to infer colonization history and patterns of selection of the perennial herb species Arabidopsis lyrata, in locally adapted populations from different parts of its distribution range (Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and USA) representing different environmental conditions. Using site frequency spectra based demographic modelling we found strong reduction in the effective population size of the species in general within the past 100 000 years, with more pronounced effects in the colonizing populations. We further found that the northwestern European A. lyrata populations (UK and Scandinavian) are more closely re...