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Published on: July 29, 2019
Heritability of progeny size in a terrestrial isopod: transgenerational environmental effects on a life history trait
M J Carter1, M A Lardies, R F Nespolo
1Departamento de Ecología, Center for Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Santiago 6513677, Chile.
Abstract:
Maternal effects, the environment that mothers provide to their offspring, their provision of nutrients and the environment that offspring of the same clutch share, have come to be recognized as an important influence on offspring fitness. In addition, in invertebrates, maternal effects and common environment may change according to a mother's diet. We tested for the changes in quantitative genetic parameters in a half-sib design where mothers were fed diets varying in nutrient content. Surprisingly, we found that not only maternal and common environmental variance changed with experimental diets but also there were significant changes in narrow-sense heritabilities, with corresponding h(2) values of 0.61 (high protein), 0.08 (high carbohydrate) and 0.001 (equal carbohydrate:protein). Our results show how an environmentally driven evolutionary process could occur in nature, since the response to selection could change dramatically according to the composition of the diet that females are ingesting.
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Transcription
Transcription is the process of synthesizing RNA from a DNA sequence by RNA polymerase. It is the first step in producing a protein from a gene sequence. Additionally, many other proteins and regulatory sequences are involved in the proper synthesis of messenger RNA (mRNA). Regulation of transcription is responsible for the differentiation of all the different types of cells and often for the proper cellular response to environmental signals.
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An example of how genetic background affects phenotype can be seen in horses. The Extension gene in horses is responsible for their coat color. A wild-type gene (EE) produces black pigment in the coat, while a mutant gene (ee) produces red pigment. A...
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