Functional synonymous variants in plants: an emerging perspective on hidden causal alleles in domestication and...

Synonymous mutations have long been treated as neutral or silent variants and are therefore often filtered out or deprioritized in genetic analyses. Yet increasing evidence shows that, even without altering protein sequence, they can influence gene function and phenotype through multiple RNA-level mechanisms. In plants, recent studies suggest that synonymous variants can act as causal alleles in domestication and agronomic traits. These developments suggest that synonymous variation represents an underappreciated component of plant causal genetics.

This Perspective synthesizes current knowledge on functional synonymous variants in plants from a plant-centred perspective. We summarize the major mechanistic routes by which synonymous variants can become functional, curate representative plant cases spanning domestication, breeding, and mutant discovery, and propose a Tier 0-3 evidence framework. We also outline a practical workflow for advancing candidate synonymous variants toward causal validation and discuss how these variants may be more explicitly incorporated into frameworks for causal inference and breeding deployment.

Functional synonymous variants are not merely rare exceptions, but an emerging class of hidden causal alleles with implications for plant genetics, evolutionary biology, and crop improvement. Reintegrating synonymous sites into the analytical framework of plant trait dissection should improve how genotype-phenotype relationships are interpreted and help reduce a persistent blind spot in candidate-variant prioritization. More broadly, synonymous variation may expand the set of causal alleles available for precision breeding by enabling fine phenotypic tuning without altering protein sequence.