Long-term response to selection predictable regardless of genetic architecture
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - 09:00
in Biology & Nature
In their latest publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Tiago Paixao, Postdoc, and Nick Barton, Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria addressed the controversial role of gene interactions (or epistasis), where the effect of one gene is affected by the presence of other genes, in the response to selection for two extremely different scenarios of evolutionary mechanisms. Evolutionary biologists so far argued over the role of epistasis on adaptation: while its effects on the short-term response are small, some argue that these can accumulate to produce large effects in the long-term.