Journal
AMERICAN NATURALIST
Volume 172, Issue 2, Pages 272-281Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/589455
Keywords
canalization; environmental variance; mutation accumulation; mutational variance; robustness
Categories
Funding
- NIGMS NIH HHS [R01 GM072639, R01 GM036827, F32 GM20887-01, R01-GM072639, F32 GM020887, R01-GM36827] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The evolution of canalization, the robustness of the phenotype to environmental or genetic perturbation, has attracted considerable recent interest. A key step toward understanding the evolution of any phenotype is characterizing the rate at which mutation introduces genetic variation for the trait ( the mutational variance, V M) and the average directional effects of mutations on the trait mean (DM). In this study, the mutational parameters for canalization of productivity and body volume are quantified in two sets of mutation accumulation lines of nematodes in the genus Caenorhabditis and are compared with the mutational parameters for the traits themselves. Four results emerge: (1) spontaneous mutations consistently decanalize the phenotype; (2) the mutational parameters for decanalization, V M ( quantified as mutational heritability) and DM, are of the same order of magnitude as the same parameters for the traits themselves; (3) the mutational parameters for canalization are roughly correlated with the parameters for the traits themselves across taxa; and (4) there is no evidence that residual segregating overdominant loci contribute to the decay of canalization. These results suggest that canalization is readily evolvable and that any evolutionary factor that causes mutations to accumulate will, on average, decanalize the phenotype.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available