Nongenetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype appears recurrently and confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Nongenetic perturbations can thus initiate evolutionary innovation. Genetic variation that is not usually phenotypically visible may play an important role in this...

Phenotypic variation has been manipulated by humans during crop domestication, which occurred primarily between 3000 and 10000 years ago in the various centers of origin around the world. The process of domestication has profound consequences on crops, where the domesticate has moderately reduced genetic diversity relative to the wild ancestor across the genome, and severely reduced diversity f...

An essential aspect of the current theory of adaptive speciation is the maintenance of phenotypic variation and the evolution of stationary stable phenotypic diversity, a phenomenon known as evolutionary branching. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that phenotypic variation can be maintained by favoring rare phenotypes, for example, through frequency-dependent selection. However, even ...

Natural variation in gene expression (expression traits or e-traits) is increasingly used for the discovery of genes controlling traits. An important question is whether a particular e-trait is correlated with a phenotypic trait. Here, we examined the correlations between phenotypic traits and e-traits among 10 Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. We studied defense against Pseudomonas syringae pv ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Although conservation biology has long focused on population dynamics and genetics, phenotypic plasticity is likely to play a significant role in population viability. Here, an investigation is made into the relative contribution of genetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity to the phenotypic variation in natural populations of Ranunculus nodiflorus, a rare annual plant inh...

Spatial patterns of heritable phenotypic diversity reflect the relative roles of gene flow and selection in determining geographic variation within a species. We quantified color differentiation and genetic divergence among 20 populations of the red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) in lower Central America. Phylogenetic analyses revealed 5 well-supported mitochondrial DNA clades, and we i...

California oaks exhibit tremendous phenotypic variation throughout their range. This variation reflects phenotypic plasticity in tree response to local environmental conditions as well as genetic differences underlying those phenotypes. In this study, we analyze phenotypic variation in leaf traits for valley oak adults sampled along three elevational transects and in young seedlings grown from ...