article review: Introgressive hybridization of threatened European tree frogs (Hyla arborea) by introduced H. intermedia in Western Switzerland BLOG POST (2)

For this blog post I wanted to talk about a research article I read from Conservation Genetics titled Introgressive hybridization of threatened European tree frogs (Hyla arborea) by introduced H. intermedia in Western Switzerland where researchers surveyed the declining population of an endangered species of European Tree frogs, Hyla arborea native to that region.  One of the few causes they speculated to lead to their decline was the arrival of the Hyla intermedia.  To test these causes, researchers captured tree frogs from the Grangettes, a municipality in the district of Glane in Switzerland and genotyped for 22 micro satellite markers.  Roughly 900 base pairs of mitochondrial cytochrome-b was sequenced.  The program for analyzing the genomic sequences was Bayesian-clustering of micro satellite genotypes into groups.  They then decomposed the genetic variations within the Principal Component Analysis (PCA).   Lastly the researchers computed allele frequencies using FSTAT.  What they found was that there is a known nuclear genome mixture between H. arborea and H intermedia, but thee rise of this phenomomon was unusual.  One scenario they pointed out that could lead to this was a female heavy environment which increased maternal transmission of mtDNA in  H intermedia while H arborea haplotypes are slowly lost.   The researches also mentioned that the isolation challenges are extremely difficult due to the lack of mate choice, because their calls were almost identical.  What I took from this article were new interesting techniques on grouping different species in order to create a map of a community's genetic diversity.  It's important to conserve native species because  many species, not just frogs, may only occur on a small part of the world.

Dufresnes, C., Dubey, S., Ghali, K., Canestrelli, D., & Perrin, N. (2015). Introgressive hybridization of threatened European tree frogs (Hyla arborea) by introduced H. intermedia in Western Switzerland. Conservation genetics, 16(6), 1507-1513.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10592-015-0745-x