With the advent of modern imaging and measurement technology, complex phenotypes are increasingly represented by large numbers of measurements, which may not bear biological meaning one by one. For such multivariate phenotypes, studying the pairwise associations between all measurements and all alleles is highly inefficient and prevents insight into the genetic pattern underlying the observed p...

Genetic studies of secondary sexual traits provide insights into whether and how selection drove their divergence among populations, and these studies often focus on the fraction of variation attributable to genes on the X-chromosome. However, such studies may sometimes misinterpret the amount of variation attributable to the X-chromosome if using only simple reciprocal F1 crosses, or they may ...

Yeast strains can reversibly interconvert between [PSI+] and [psi-] states. The [PSI+] state is caused by a prion form of the translation termination factor eRF3. The [PSI+] state causes read-through at stop codons and can lead to phenotypic variation, although the molecular mechanisms causing those phenotypic changes remain unknown. We identify an interaction between [PSI+]-induced phenotypic ...

Phenotypic plasticity describes the capacity of a genotype to exhibit a range of phenotypes in response to variation in the environment. Environmental variation encompasses both abiotic and biotic components of the environment, including interactions among organisms. The strength and outcome of many ecological interactions, ranging from antagonism to mutualism, are mediated through the phenotyp...

Emerging concepts in developmental biology, such as facilitated variation and dynamical patterning modules, address a major shortcoming of the Modern Synthesis in Biology: how genotypic variation is transduced into functional yet diverse phenotypic variation. Still, we lack a theory to explain how variation at the cellular and tissue level is coordinated into variation at the whole-organism lev...

The phenotypic effects of genetic and environmental manipulations have been rarely investigated simultaneously. In addition to phenotypic plasticity, their effect on the amount and directions of genetic and phenotypic variation is of particular evolutionary importance because these constitute the material for natural selection. Here, we used heterozygous insertional mutations of 16 genes involv...

It is generally accepted that taxa exhibit genetic variation in phenotypic plasticity, but many questions remain unanswered about how divergent plastic responses evolve under dissimilar ecological conditions. Hormones are signaling molecules that act as proximate mediators of phenotype expression by regulating a variety of cellular, physiological, and behavioral responses. Hormones not only cha...

Phenotypic variation is common among conspecifics from the same population, but its causes are not always clear. Parasites may often play a role, as their ability to induce phenotypic changes in their hosts is well established, though not widely acknowledged among marine ecologists. Here, we tested for a possible role of parasites as determinants of marked colour polymorphism, as well as variat...