The genetic architecture of local adaptation is historically contingent

Abstract Revealing the genetic basis of local adaptation is a common goal of evolutionary biology, but despite theoretical progress, general expectations for the genetic architecture of local adaptation are still unclear. Theoretical analyses usually model simplified ecologies or simplified genetic architectures of adaptive traits, so the interplay of these factors is missing from our understanding. In this study, we use simulations to explore how the interplay of ecological and genetic parameters influences the evolution and genetic architecture of local adaptation. With these simulations, we ask: i) What are the features of alleles that made the largest contribution to local adaptation, and how are they affected by polygenicity of adaptive traits, migration rates, demographic history, and the spatial pattern of the environment? And ii) does allele age moderate the confounding effect from population structure in genotype-environmental associations (GEA)? We find that the frequency, number, and phenotypic effect size of locally adaptive alleles are sensitive to trait polygenicity and demographic history, and that these factors shape the evolutionary dynamics of local adaptation. We find that population expansions can leave legacies in the genetic architecture of local adaptation, reducing the expected number of adaptive alleles relative to models with constant population size, and this effect is long-lasting. Compared to range expansion, other ecological variables known to affect the genetic basis of local adaptation had limited effects. Finally, allele age moderated the confounding effect of population structure and modified the causal effect of environmental variables on genotypes. Alleles that arose around the time of environmental changes often made large contributions to local adaptation, but young alleles often had the highest false positive rates and were the most common age category. We describe how incorporating allele age and its interactions with population structure and environmental variables may increase the sensitivity and specificity of GEA analysis. Overall, this work demonstrates the critical importance that a species’ demographic history can have on its genetic architecture of local adaptation. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.