Testing for a role of postzygotic incompatibilities in rapidly speciated Lake Victoria cichlids

Abstract

Intrinsic postzygotic hybrid incompatibilities are usually due to negative epistatic interactions between alleles from different parental genomes. While such incompatibilities are thought to be uncommon in speciation with gene flow, they may be important if such speciation results from a hybrid population. Here we aimed to test this idea in the endemic cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria. Hundreds of species have evolved within the lake in <15k years from a hybrid progenitor. While the importance of prezygotic barriers to gene flow is well established in this system, the possible relevance of postzygotic genetic incompatibilities is unknown. We inferred the presence of negative epistatic interactions from systematic patterns of genotype ratio distortions in experimental crosses and wild samples. We then compared the positions of putative incompatibility loci to regions of high genetic differentiation between sympatric sister species as well as between members of clades that may have arisen at the start of this radiation, and further determined if the loci showed fixed differences between the closest living relatives of the lineages ancestral to the hybrid progenitor. Overall, we find little evidence for a major role of intrinsic postzygotic incompatibilities in the Lake Victoria radiation. However, we find putative incompatibility loci significantly more often coinciding with islands of genetic differentiation between species that separated early in the radiation than between the youngest sister species, consistent with the hypothesis that such variants segregated in the hybrid swarm and were sorted between species in the early speciation events.