4.3 | Gene ontology enrichment
The GO enrichment analysis yielded particularly interesting and
intuitive results. The selective processes identified here act during
the developmental and high growth larval life stage, and 87% of the
general biological processes associated with the LFMM identified
putative selected genes directly corresponded to development and growth.
The remaining 7% and 5% were associated with intracellular processes
and metabolism respectively. Furthermore, in 2014, we did not identify
any biological processes associated with growth or metabolism,
indicating that the early life conditions were favorable across the
habitat surveyed, with little selection acting on those gene variants.
The numerous processes identified in 2015, however, may be indicative of
unfavorable oceanic conditions, leading to a significant loss of
phenotypes with the deleterious gene variants. Because 2015 was an
unusually warm year (Gentemann et al., 2017), it is not surprising that
these warmer temperatures would directly affect metabolic processes.
This is underscored by our finding of associations between fatty acid,
lipid metabolism, and temperature for 2015, but not for 2014.