Population genetics analysis of haplochromine cichlids in Lake Victoria

This project involves the whole genome resequencing data of 21 samples of haplochromine cichlids from Lake Victoria to perform a large-scale population genomics study. This project is associated with the publication by Imamoto et al. in Molecular Biology and Evolution (2024), which aimed to understand how the expansion of invasive carnivorous fish, Nile Perch, impacted the genomic structure of endemic cichlids in Lake Victoria. We revealed that four species experienced bottleneck events, showing poor genetic diversity within species following the decrease in population size, likely caused by the upsurge of Nile Perch. As predicted in previous studies, we detected bottleneck events in two species from the piscivorous trophic group, egg-eaters. The strongest bottleneck was observed in matumbi hunter, an egg-eater, and that strong bottleneck caused high genetic differentiation even from the closely related species.