Diametrical diseases reflect evolutionary-genetic tradeoffs

Direct and correlated responses to artificial selection on acute thermal stress tolerance in a livebearing fish.

Tradeoffs in performance or fitness across environments have important implications regarding the nature of evolutionary constraints. It remains controversial whether tradeoffs such as these reflect genetic correlations that are genuine evolutionary constraints. However, if such long-term genetic constraints do exist, they must be due to underlying pleiotropy such that alleles that confer high ...

Evolutionary Tradeoffs

In biological systems, traits are often linked in ways that prevent simultaneous optimization of all of them. The resulting ‘evolutionary tradeoffs’ reflect necessary compromises among the functions of multiple traits. Such compromises are particularly clear when energy must be allocated among competing metabolic functions. Energy allocated to growth is not available for reproduction, immune fu...

Genetic mapping of adaptation reveals fitness tradeoffs in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Organisms inhabiting different environments are often locally adapted, and yet despite a considerable body of theory, the genetic basis of local adaptation is poorly understood. Unanswered questions include the number and effect sizes of adaptive loci, whether locally favored loci reduce fitness elsewhere (i.e., fitness tradeoffs), and whether a lack of genetic variation limits adaptation. To a...

Evolutionary tradeoffs and the structure of allelic polymorphisms

A Note on Evolutionary Rate Estimation in Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis: Focus on Pathogens

Bayesian evolutionary analysis provide a statistically sound and flexible framework for estimation of evolutionary parameters. In this method, posterior estimates of evolutionary rate (μ) are derived by combining evolutionary information in the data with researcher’s prior knowledge about the true value of μ. Nucleotide sequence samples of fast evolving pathogens that are taken at d...