Phenotypic adjustments following environmental change are ubiquitous, and trait changes arising through phenotypic plasticity often lag behind their stimuli. Evolutionary biologists seeking to understand how adaptive can evolve have extensively studied this phenomenon. However, the ecological consequences of common features plastic responses variability, including gradual (i.e., slower than pac...

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C ellular plasticity has become the subject of intense research, with perhaps the greatest example provided by the recent Nobel Prize winners Drs Yamananka and Gurdon and the demonstration that terminally differentiated fibro-blasts can be coaxed into assuming an embryonic stem cell-like fate. Emerging evidence suggests that plasticity inherent in cells may be hijacked in the progression of dis...

Community genetic studies generally ignore the plasticity of the functional traits through which the effect is passed from individuals to the associated community. However, the ability of organisms to be phenotypically plastic allows them to rapidly adapt to changing environments and plasticity is commonly observed across all taxa. Owing to the fitness benefits of phenotypic plasticity, evoluti...

Phenotypic plasticity is an environmentally based change in the phenotype. Understanding the evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity has been hampered by dissenting opinions on the merits of different methods of description, on the underlying genetic mechanisms, and on the way that plasticity is affected by natural selection in a heterogeneous environment. During much of this debate, the au...

Phenotype definition is controlled by epigenetic regulations that allow cells to acquire their differentiated state. The process is reversible and attractive for therapeutic intervention and for the reactivation of hypermethylated pluripotency genes that facilitate transition to a higher plasticity state. We report the results obtained in human fibroblasts exposed to the epigenetic modifier 5-a...