Structural variants and transposable elements as facilitators of rapid evolutionary change in invasive populations

Invasion genomics quantifies genetic diversity within populations to understand structure, demography, dispersal and adaptation during invasion. Routinely, large numbers of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are used as a proxy for genome-wide diversity. However, non-SNP variants, including structural variants (SVs) and transposable elements (TEs), represent a previously understudied area of invasion genomics that may play an important role in invasive species’ success. This chapter explores SVs and TEs, their impact on rapid evolution and their role in biological invasions. Emphasis is placed on the deleterious nature of SVs and TEs, their interaction with invasion processes such as demography and selection regime shifts, as well as their unique contributions – SVs to recombination landscapes and TEs to novel variation and gene regulation. Finally, we offer practical recommendations for working with these complicated genomic features and suggest key future directions for understanding how they contribute to the success of biological invasions.