New insights on patterns of genetic admixture and phylogeographic history in Iberian high mountain populations of midwife toads Lucati, Federica Jowers, Michael Joséph Data Availability: Newly generated sequence data are available in GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/) under the following accession numbers: OP779379-OP779400 for ND4, OP820514-OP820517 for cyt-b, OP820518-OP820519 for β-fibint7, OP846560-OP846568 for 12S, and OP851584-OP851590 for 16S. Original sequence alignments and microsatellite genotypes are available in the Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7270824). Funding: This work was supported by the European Commission projects LIFE+ LIMNOPIRINEUS (LIFE13 NAT/ES/001210, PI: M.V.), LIFE RESQUE ALPYR (LIFE20 NAT/ES/00347, PI: M.V.) and Biodiversa FISHME (BiodivRestor-280, PI: M.V.) and by the Spanish Government projects FUNBIO (RTI2018-096217-B-I00, PI: M.V.), BIOOCULT (2413/2017, PI: M.V.), (Organismo Autónomo Parques Nacionales 2399/2017; PI: J.B) and Picos de Europa National Park grants for 2015 and 2016 (PI: J.B.). F.L. had a doctoral grant funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, grant number PD/BD/52598/2014). M.J.J. had an International collaboration grant (National Institute of Ecology) and a postdoctoral grant funded by FCT (grant number SFRH/BPD/109148/2015). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Multiple Quaternary glacial refugia in the Iberian Peninsula, commonly known as “refugia within refugia”, allowed diverging populations to come into contact and admix, potentially boosting substantial mito-nuclear discordances. In this study, we employ a comprehensive set of mitochondrial and nuclear markers to shed light onto the drivers of geographical differentiation in Iberian high mountain populations of the midwife toads Alytes obstetricans and A. almogavarii from the Pyrenees, Picos de Europa and Guadarrama Mountains. In the three analysed mountain regions, we detected evidence of extensive mito-nuclear discordances and/or admixture between taxa. Clustering analyses identified three major divergent lineages in the Pyrenees (corresponding to the eastern, central and central-western Pyrenees), which possibly recurrently expanded and admixed during the succession of glacialinterglacial periods that characterised the Late Pleistocene, and that currently follow a ringshaped diversification pattern. On the other hand, populations from the Picos de Europa mountains (NW Iberian Peninsula) showed a mitochondrial affinity to central-western Pyrenean populations and a nuclear affinity to populations from the central Iberian Peninsula, suggesting a likely admixed origin for Picos de Europa populations. Finally, populations from the Guadarrama Mountain Range (central Iberian Peninsula) were depleted of genetic diversity, possibly as a consequence of a recent epidemic of chytridiomycosis. This work highlights the complex evolutionary history that shaped the current genetic composition of high mountain populations, and underscores the importance of using a multilocus approach to better infer the dynamics of population divergence. 2022-12-19T12:33:49Z 2022-12-19T12:33:49Z 2022-12-01 journal article Lucati F, Miro´ A, Bosch J, Caner J, Jowers MJ, Rivera X, et al. (2022) New insights on patterns of genetic admixture and phylogeographic history in Iberian high mountain populations of midwife toads. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0277298. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277298] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/78575 10.1371/journal.pone.0277298 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Public Library of Science