Phenotypic plasticity

Author(s):  
Karen D. Williams ◽  
Marla B. Sokolowski

Why is there so much variation in insect behavior? This chapter will address the sources of behavioral variability, with a particular focus on phenotypic plasticity. Variation in social, nutritional, and seasonal environmental contexts during development and adulthood can give rise to phenotypic plasticity. To delve into mechanism underlying behavioral flexibility in insects, examples of polyphenisms, a type of phenotypic plasticity, will be discussed. Selected examples reveal that environmental change can affect gene expression, which in turn can affect behavioral plasticity. These changes in gene expression together with gene-by-environment interactions are discussed to illuminate our understanding of insect behavioral plasticity.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette B Moss ◽  
Christopher B Cunningham ◽  
Elizabeth C McKinney ◽  
Allen J. Moore

Parenting buffers offspring from hostile environments, but it is not clear how or if the genes that underlie parenting change their expression under environmental stress. We recently demonstrated that for the subsocial carrion beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis, temperature during parenting does not affect parenting phenotypes. Here, we ask if transcriptional changes associated with parenting are likewise robust to environmental stress. The absence of a transcriptional response for parenting under stress would suggest that the genetic programs for parenting and being parented are canalized. Conversely, a robust transcriptional response would suggest that plasticity of underlying gene expression is critical for maintaining behavioral stability, and that these mechanisms provide a potential target for selection in the face of environmental change. We test these alternatives by characterizing gene expression of parents and offspring with and without parent-offspring interactions under a benign and a stressful temperature. We found that parent-offspring interactions elicit distinct transcriptional responses of parents and larvae irrespective of temperature. We further detected robust changes of gene expression in beetles breeding at 24 degrees C compared to 20 degrees C irrespective of family interaction. However, no strong interaction between parent-offspring interaction and temperature was detected for either parents or larvae. We therefore conclude that canalization, not plasticity of gene expression, most likely explains the absence of behavioral plasticity under thermal stress. This result suggests that species may not have the genetic variation needed to respond to all environmental change, especially for complex phenotypes.


Nature ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 582 (7812) ◽  
pp. S10-S11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Campbell

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 1382-1393
Author(s):  
Xinyu Jiang ◽  
Qingxin Song ◽  
Wenxue Ye ◽  
Z. Jeffrey Chen

AbstractDuring evolution successful allopolyploids must overcome ‘genome shock’ between hybridizing species but the underlying process remains elusive. Here, we report concerted genomic and epigenomic changes in resynthesized and natural Arabidopsis suecica (TTAA) allotetraploids derived from Arabidopsisthaliana (TT) and Arabidopsisarenosa (AA). A. suecica shows conserved gene synteny and content with more gene family gain and loss in the A and T subgenomes than respective progenitors, although A. arenosa-derived subgenome has more structural variation and transposon distributions than A. thaliana-derived subgenome. These balanced genomic variations are accompanied by pervasive convergent and concerted changes in DNA methylation and gene expression among allotetraploids. The A subgenome is hypomethylated rapidly from F1 to resynthesized allotetraploids and convergently to the T-subgenome level in natural A. suecica, despite many other methylated loci being inherited from F1 to all allotetraploids. These changes in DNA methylation, including small RNAs, in allotetraploids may affect gene expression and phenotypic variation, including flowering, silencing of self-incompatibility and upregulation of meiosis- and mitosis-related genes. In conclusion, concerted genomic and epigenomic changes may improve stability and adaptation during polyploid evolution.


2003 ◽  
Vol 100 (10) ◽  
pp. 5920-5925 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Alami ◽  
Y. Fan ◽  
S. Pack ◽  
T. M. Sonbuchner ◽  
A. Besse ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (13) ◽  
pp. 3345-3359 ◽  
Author(s):  
David I. Dayan ◽  
Douglas L. Crawford ◽  
Marjorie F. Oleksiak

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Corbett ◽  
Clare L. van Eyk ◽  
Dani L. Webber ◽  
Stephen J. Bent ◽  
Morgan Newman ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Pais ◽  
Kentaro Yoshida ◽  
Artemis Giannakopoulou ◽  
Mathieu A. Pel ◽  
Liliana M. Cano ◽  
...  

Outbreaks caused by asexual lineages of fungal and oomycete pathogens are an expanding threat to crops, wild animals and natural ecosystems (Fisher et al. 2012,Kupferschmidt 2012). However, the mechanisms underlying genome evolution and phenotypic plasticity in asexual eukaryotic microbes remain poorly understood (Seidl and Thomma 2014). Ever since the 19th century Irish famine, the oomycete Phytophthora infestans has caused recurrent outbreaks on potato and tomato crops that have been primarily caused by the successive rise and migration of pandemic asexual lineages (Cooke et al. 2012, Yoshida et al. 2013,Yoshida et al. 2014). Here, we reveal patterns of genomic and gene expression variation within a P. infestans asexual lineage by compared sibling strains belonging to the South American EC-1 clone that has dominated Andean populations since the 1990s (Forbes et al. 1997, Oyarzun et al. 1998, Delgado et al. 2013, Yoshida et al. 2013, Yoshida et al. 2014). We detected numerous examples of structural variation, nucleotide polymorphisms and gene conversion within the EC-1 clone. Remarkably, 17 genes are not expressed in one of the two EC-1 isolates despite apparent absence of sequence polymorphisms. Among these, silencing of an effector gene was associated with evasion of disease resistance conferred by a potato immune receptor. These results highlight the exceptional genetic and phenotypic plasticity that underpins host adaptation in a pandemic clonal lineage of a eukaryotic plant pathogen.


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