Temporal changes in genetic variation during the invasion of Lygodium japonicum in North America

Mainland Asia is the most likely source region of Lygodium japonicum invasion into North America, based on low-coverage genome skimming of herbarium specimens from 1905–2017.

• Why it matters: Invasive species spread quickly, yet the genomic basis of colonization, climate adaptation, and bottleneck effects during establishment remains difficult to test across time.
• What they did: Using herbarium nuclear DNA, the study identified invasion source(s), then ran genotype-environment analysis on invaded-range samples to find 144 candidate SNPs linked to five bioclimatic variables, and compared heterozygosity over time across non-coding, coding, and putatively adaptive loci.
• The result: Precipitation of the driest month was linked to the greatest number of SNPs, suggesting rapid genomic adaptation, while non-coding loci showed a small but significant heterozygosity decrease and putatively adaptive loci showed no evidence of a genetic bottleneck.

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