Cai Haoran, Melo Diogo, Des Marais David L
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Trends Genet. 2025 Jan;41(1):23-32. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2024.09.008. Epub 2024 Oct 22.
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While most population genetic frameworks assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in developmental systems. Here, we revisit the concept of developmental bias - the observation that the generation of phenotypic variation is biased due to the structure, character, composition, or dynamics of the developmental system - and argue that a more rigorous investigation into the role of developmental bias in the genotype-to-phenotype map will produce fundamental insights into evolutionary processes, with potentially important consequences on the relation between micro- and macro-evolution. We discuss the hierarchical relationships between different types of variational biases, including mutation bias and developmental bias, and their roles in shaping the realized phenotypic space. Furthermore, we highlight the challenges in studying variational bias and propose potential approaches to identify developmental bias using modern tools.
生物体的非凡多样性以及它们对环境的适应性从根本上取决于变异的可获得性。虽然大多数群体遗传框架假定随机突变产生各向同性的表型变异，但自然选择可利用的变异分布受到更多限制，因为表型变异的分布受发育系统中一系列因素的影响。在这里，我们重新审视发育偏向的概念——即观察到由于发育系统的结构、特征、组成或动态性，表型变异的产生存在偏向——并认为对发育偏向在基因型到表型映射中的作用进行更严格的研究将为进化过程带来基本见解，这可能对微观和宏观进化之间的关系产生重要影响。我们讨论了不同类型的变异偏向之间的层次关系，包括突变偏向和发育偏向，以及它们在塑造实际表型空间中的作用。此外，我们强调了研究变异偏向的挑战，并提出了使用现代工具识别发育偏向的潜在方法。
