The genomic consequences of selection across development

Understanding how natural selection drives diversification in nature has been at the forefront of biological research for over a century. The main idea is simple: natural selection favours individuals best suited to pass on their genes. However, the journey from birth to reproduction is complex as organisms experience multiple developmental stages, each influenced by genetic and environmental factors (Orr, 2009). These complexities compound even further as each stage of development might be governed by a unique underlying set of alleles and genes. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Goebl et al. (2022) examine the role of natural selection in driving ecotypic divergence across different life history stages of the prairie sunflower Helianthus petiolaris. The authors used reciprocal transplant experiments, demographic models, and genomic sequencing to explore fitness variation across developmental stages. They show how natural selection impacts population divergence across multiple life history stages and evaluate the resulting allele frequency changes. Goebl et al. link these results to the role of chromosomal inversions, thus furthering our understanding of how ecological divergence proceeds in the face of gene flow. Below, we explore these results in detail and complement their interpretation by considering the evolution of genetic correlations amongst traits governing fitness.