Sexual Dimorphism Increases Evolvability in a Genetic Regulatory Network |
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Authors: | Janna L Fierst |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biological Science, King Life Sciences Building, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA;(2) Present address: Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-5289, USA |
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Abstract: | The majority of work on genetic regulatory networks has focused on environmental and mutational robustness, and much less
attention has been paid to the conditions under which a network may produce an evolvable phenotype. Sexually dimorphic characters
often show rapid rates of change over short evolutionary time scales and while this is thought to be due to the strength of
sexual selection acting on the trait, a dimorphic character with an underlying pleiotropic architecture may also influence
the evolution of the regulatory network that controls the character and affect evolvability. As evolvability indicates a capacity
for phenotypic change and mutational robustness refers to a capacity for phenotypic stasis, increases in evolvability may
show a negative relationship with mutational robustness. I tested this with a computational model of a genetic regulatory
network and found that, contrary to expectation, sexually dimorphic characters exhibited both higher mutational robustness
and higher evolvability. Decomposition of the results revealed that linkage disequilibrium within sex and linkage disequilibrium
between sexes, two of the three primary components of additive genetic variance and evolvability in quantitative genetics
models, contributed to the differences in evolvability between sexually dimorphic and monomorphic populations. These results
indicate that producing two pleiotropically linked characters did not constrain either the production of a robust phenotype
or adaptive potential. Instead, the genetic system evolved to maximize both quantities. |
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