Comparative genomics of venom divergence among recently diverged pitviper species

The molecular mechanisms that underlie adaptive divergence in complex traits can be assessed in traits like animal venoms where variation in gene sequence and expression levels can be directly linked to functional divergence in phenotypes. We assembled and annotated reference genomes for the Sistrurus rattlesnake species to assessed the impact of coding sequence evolution, gene duplication and loss, and expression variation on venom divergence.