Published: Aug 23, 2022
Dr. Dörthe Becker and co-authors publish a study that demonstrates that phenotypic plasticity is subject to stabilizing selection in natural populations. A classic example of adaptive plasticity is the anti-predator response of Daphnia to grow a “helmet” in the presence of a predator cue. Becker et al develop a novel method to characterize the shape of the helmet across the entire anterior-posterior axis. By characterizing the response in genetically diverse and mutation-accumulation lines, we show that regions of the A-P axis with the greatest plastic response show the greatest reduction in heritability in the induced state, a sign of stabilizing seleciton. By measuring the plastic response in wild caught “mutation accumulation” lines, we were able to study mutational variation, and the relative change of additive to mutational variation acros the AP axis. We show that this is reduced in regions with greatest plasticity, another signal of stabilizing seleciton
Read more here: Nature Ecology and Evolution
Read more here: bioRxiv