Metapopulation of Ellobium chinense through the Late-middle and Late
Pleistocene expansions: four covariate COI hotspots linked to
G-quadruplex conformation
Abstract
The land snail Ellobium chinense (Pulmonata, Ellobiida,
Ellobiidae), which inhabits the salt marshes along the coastal areas of
northwestern Pacific, is an endangered species on the IUCN Red List.
Over recent decades, the population size of E. chinense has
consistently decreased due to environmental interference caused by
natural disasters and human activities. Here, we provide the first
assessment of the genetic diversity and population genetic structures of
northwestern Pacific E. chinense based on COI and 10
microsatellite markers. The analyses of 140 COI data from South
Korea and Japan and 54 microsatellite data from South Korea revealed
that E. chinense has high haplotype and low nucleotide diversity
without showing any genetic structures that reflect geographical
isolations. It strongly implies that the subfamily Ellobiinae may have
first appeared around the Eocene Optimum immediately after the
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; ca. 55 mya) and the examined
E. chinense populations in Northwestern Pacific may have been
maintained in a metapopulation under the influence of the Kuroshio warm
currents through the Late-Middle Pleistocene (0.350−0.126 mya) and Late
Pleistocene (0.126−0.012 mya). We also found four phylogenetic groups,
regardless of geographical distributions, which were easily
distinguishable by four unidirectional and stepwise adenine-to-guanine
transitions in COI (sites 207-282-354-420: A-A-A-A, A-A-G-A,
G-A-G-A, and G-G-G-G). Additionally, the four COI hotspots were
robustly connected with a high degree of covariance between them. We
discuss the role of these covariate guanines which link to form four
consecutive G-quadruplexes, and their possible beneficial effects under
positive selection pressure.