Tackling the Lewontin´s paradox in plants

How and why genetic diversity varies among species is a central and long standing question in evolutionary biology.

In the 70´s Richard Lewontin noted that the observed range of variation is much too narrow than expected given the huge range of population sizes ("the Lewontin´s paradox").

Despite recent progress, this puzzling observation remains unresolved, likely because the various hypotheses (role of demography, selection and recombination, and life-history traits) have been studied separately.

We will analyse all processes together, focusing on seed plants, which offer large variations in abundance, life history traits, and genomic attributes.

We will ask i) How do demography, selection and recombination shape genetic diversity among species? ii) Does it depends on life history traits? iii) Is it enough to explain the Lewontin´s paradox?

We will build on a unique recombination dataset we have already gathered and on publicly available polymorphism data and life history and ecological traits for each species.

We will run a combination of population genomic analyses to infer past and recent demography, the intensity of selection modulated by recombination and how it depends on life history and ecological traits. Empirical results will be compare to extensive simulations.

We will obtain the first broad integrated characterization of the processes shaping genetic diversity across genomes and among species, and wether it resolve (or not) the Lewontin paradox in plants.