Fig. 4: Estimates of genetic diversity, inbreeding and genomic mutation loads based on whole-genome resequencing data from northern (M. angustirostris) and southern (M. leonina) elephant seals (n = 20 each).
From: Genomic and fitness consequences of a near-extinction event in the northern elephant seal
a, Box-and-whiskers plots showing the distribution of nucleotide diversity (π) within non-overlapping 1 Mb windows along the genome. The white points show genome-wide mean π values, the boxes indicate the first and third quartiles, the horizontal lines indicate the medians and the whiskers extend up to 1.5× the interquartile range. Outliers have been omitted for clarity. b, Mean individual genome-wide heterozygosity. c, The magnitude of individual inbreeding as expressed by the genomic inbreeding coefficient FROH (with a minimum ROH length threshold of 1 Mb). Smaller ROH length thresholds resulted in larger FROH values, as shown in Extended Data Fig. 8, but the overall pattern remained unchanged. d, Individual genomic mutation loads based on tallies of putatively deleterious SNPs detected in each individual. These were classified into the inbreeding load (heterozygous SNPs) and the realized load (homozygous SNPs). The realized load was further decomposed into the segregating load (mutations that are variable within a species) and the drift load (mutations that are fixed within a species). e, Individual genomic mutation loads decomposed into the inbreeding, segregating and drift loads, as shown in the legend. In b–e, the northern elephant seal individuals are colour coded according to their most likely cause of death, as shown in the legend. NA refers to the southern elephant seal individuals, which were not assigned to fitness categories.
