Fig. 4: Erosion of genetic variation differs among alternative splice event types.
From: Alternative splicing in seasonal plasticity and the potential for adaptation to environmental change
a We analysed five major splice event types: alternative 3′ (A3SS) and 5′ splice sites (A5SS), skipped exons (SE), intron retention (IR), and mutually exclusive exons (MXE). In the abdomen, b small subsets of detected splice events were significantly differentially spliced (coloured bars) between seasonal morphs. The panel to the right zooms out to show all detected events (dark grey bars outlined in black). c Nucleotide diversity (π) among genes with no splicing events (None, light grey), nonsignificant splicing (NS, dark grey) and differential splicing by season (DS, yellow) indicate that seasonally spliced genes have decreased polymorphism. The horizontal grey line indicates the median π for genes with no splicing (“None”). d For genes containing one event type, π was lower in DS genes compared to both NS genes across all event types. The grey line extends from c. DS genes for all event types were also different from genes with no splice events c, d. Point clouds represent π values for each gene set. Values are summarized with boxplots: the center line represents the median, the box encloses the 25th–75th quartiles and is notched (median ± 1.58 * interquartile/\(\sqrt{n}\)), and whiskers extend to 1.5x the interquartile range. An asterisk (*) centred over a horizontal line between groups indicates a meaningful statistical difference between these groups whereas an asterisk centred over the DS points indicates a statistical difference from the grey line (Bayesian linear models, Supplementary Fig. 11A, 13A). See supplementary Fig. 10, 11, 13 and Supplementary Table 8, 9 for figures and analyses based on thorax samples. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
