Genomic impacts of hybridization: what have we learned so far from models and data from Iberian chubs?

Hybridization seems widespread across many taxa. At the genomic level, hybridization has a dual role: it can act as a source of genetic variation fueling adaptation, but it can also result in reduced fitness due to genetic incompatibilities. I will illustrate how population genomics data can be useful to detect hybridization and reconstruct the evolutionary history of species. I will provide an overview of the research we do at the Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics group, focusing on endemic Iberian freshwater fish (chubs of genus Squalius). I will discuss how species with current non-overlapping and allopatric distributions show evidence of past introgression, including cases of recent and ancient hybridization. We raise the hypothesis that ancient hybridization allowed admixed lineages to exclude and/or assimilate parental species, promoting further hybridization with other species. I will contextualize these results in terms of predictions from simulations under models of speciation in the face of gene flow.

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