Subterranean Fishes of the World

3261

2017

AIM 2017

Independent lineages of lacustrine Astyanax species have shown convergent morphologies mainly associated with trophic habits differences. Those differences between lacustrine species corresponded to both body and trophic related traits. Despites the morphological differences, which have made taxonomist to identified the different lacustrine forms as different genera (e.g. Astyanax and Bramocharax), there is not a clear correspondence between genetic structure and morphological divergence. Partial gene flow analyses, have shown a lack of prezygotic barriers among divergent morphotypes. Based on the previously exposed problematic, the main goal of the present stifle was to characterized the morphological variation among lacustrine morphs, using Micro CT- Scans, in order to characterize the major osteological differences among lacustrine forms and evaluate at this scale convergent patterns of morphological evolution, the previous analyses were based on Geometric Morphometrics data of four lineages of Astyanax (Catemaco Lake, Metzabook, Managua Lake and Lake Nicaragua). We also carried out a RNA-seq analysis, in order to identify differences in expression levels of alternative phenotypes in the four lacustrine systems within the Astyanax genus, in the Illumina platform. Based on the MANOVA carried out with the geometric morphometric data, we found significant effect of both species and lakes (P<0.05). For the RNA-Seq analyses, we identify a correlation index between divergent lacustrine morphs of 0.83%. Among the most differentiated genes, we found 47 related to metabolic aspects. The genes that presented the highest differences in the expression levels were: Craniofacial protein 1, CD74, preproinsuline, galactose – 3 – O – Sulfotransferase 1b and acetyl-CoA carboxilase.

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