Allele transmission distortion in backcrosses between Silene dioica and Silene latifolia

Crosses between diverging lineages or incipient species are an important tool to assess intrinsic genomic barriers to gene flow that arise in the absence of environmental selection. Identifying these barriers to gene flow experimentally and comparing their strength an prevalence to other barriers of gene flow such as adaptive differentiation constitutes and important step in speciation research. To study intrinsic genomic barriers in the sister species Silene dioica and Silene latifolia, backcrosses between the two species were produced and genotyped using ddRAD-seq. The data was used to identify loci showing allele transmission distortion and draw conclusions about the underlying processes.