The Developmental Genetics of Brain-Body Allometry

生物体变异最普遍的特征之一是形状与大小1相关。这种异速生长变异是整合或性状协同变化的一个例子。整合与遗传变异相结合，导致性状之间的协变，这使得对选择的表型反应成为可能，但也限制了表型反应。当发育过程驱动多个特征的变异时，整合就发生了。通过引导遗传和环境影响，整合赋予表型协变结构。理解这种结构是现代生物学中最困难的问题之一的关键--发育如何将遗传转化为复杂性状的表型变异--这是一个现代基因组学方法尚未产生令人满意的答案的问题。

One of the most ubiquitous features of organismal variation is that shape correlates with size 1. This allometric variation is an example of integration or the tendency for traits to covary. Integration combined with genetic variation results in covariation among traits that enables but also restricts phenotypic responses to selection. Integration occurs when developmental processes drive variation in multiple traits. By channeling genetic and environmental influences, integration imparts structure on phenotypic covariation. Understanding this structure is key to one of the most difficult problems in modern biology – how development translates genetic to phenotypic variation in complex traits – a question to which modern genomic approaches have not yielded satisfactory answers.