The developmental genetics of biological robustness
The developmental genetics of biological robustness
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DOI：
10.1093/aob/mcv128
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发表时间：
2016-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
Barkoulas, Michalis
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Boukhibar, Lamia Mestek;Barkoulas, Michalis
背景 生物体不断面临扰动，例如包括温度和营养可用性波动在内的环境变化，或突变等遗传变化。虽然一些发育系统受到此类挑战的影响并表现出表型性状的变化，但其他系统尽管受到扰动，仍持续产生不变的表型。生命系统在面对扰动时保持不变表型的能力被称为发育稳健性。生物稳健性是跨门观察到的一种现象，研究其机制对于破译基因型-表型关系至关重要。最近在酵母、动物和植物中的研究表明，稳健性是由基因控制的，并已开始揭示其背后的潜在机制。范围和结论研究生物稳健性涉及关注发育性状的一个重要特性，即群体内的表型分布。这常常被忽视，因为绝大多数发育生物学研究关注的是种群总量，例如性状平均值。通过借鉴动物和酵母的研究结果，该观点考虑了植物发育稳健性的研究如何受益于对选择的发育系统和相关扰动的严格定义，以及基因对性状均值和性状方差的影响之间的明确区别。定量发育生物学和高通量表型分析的最新进展现在允许设计有针对性的遗传筛选，以识别放大或限制发育性状变异的基因，并研究变异如何在生物系统中的不同表型水平上传播。更多影响性状变异的数量性状位点的分子表征将为调节发育稳健性的基因的进化提供进一步的见解。对密切相关物种的稳健性机制的研究将解决稳健性机制在进化上是否保守的问题。
Background Living organisms are continuously confronted with perturbations, such as environmental changes that include fluctuations in temperature and nutrient availability, or genetic changes such as mutations. While some developmental systems are affected by such challenges and display variation in phenotypic traits, others continue consistently to produce invariable phenotypes despite perturbation. This ability of a living system to maintain an invariable phenotype in the face of perturbations is termed developmental robustness. Biological robustness is a phenomenon observed across phyla, and studying its mechanisms is central to deciphering the genotype-phenotype relationship. Recent work in yeast, animals and plants has shown that robustness is genetically controlled and has started to reveal the underlying mechinisms behind it.Scope and Conclusions Studying biological robustness involves focusing on an important property of developmental traits, which is the phenotypic distribution within a population. This is often neglected because the vast majority of developmental biology studies instead focus on population aggregates, such as trait averages. By drawing on findings in animals and yeast, this Viewpoint considers how studies on plant developmental robustness may benefit from strict definitions of what is the developmental system of choice and what is the relevant perturbation, and also from clear distinctions between gene effects on the trait mean and the trait variance. Recent advances in quantitative developmental biology and high-throughput phenotyping now allow the design of targeted genetic screens to identify genes that amplify or restrict developmental trait variance and to study how variation propagates across different phenotypic levels in biological systems. The molecular characterization of more quantitative trait loci affecting trait variance will provide further insights into the evolution of genes modulating developmental robustness. The study of robustness mechanisms in closely related species will address whether mechanisms of robustness are evolutionarily conserved.