Plant-pollinator interactions are thought to be major drivers of floral trait diversity. However, the relative importance of divergent pollinator-mediated selection vs. neutral processes in floral character evolution has rarely been explored. We tested for adaptive floral trait evolution by comparing differentiation at neutral genetic loci to differentiation at quantitative floral traits in a p...

BACKGROUND Mutations in Ras/mitogen-activated protein kinase (Ras/MAPK) pathway genes lead to a class of disorders known as RASopathies, including neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), Noonan syndrome (NS), Costello syndrome (CS), and cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome (CFC). Previous work has suggested potential genetic and phenotypic overlap between dysregulation of Ras/MAPK signalling and autism spec...

one of the problems in growing olive trees is pollen-incompatibility. this study was conducted in gorgan climatic condition to determine the self-incompatibility of olive cv koroneiki and to select the suitable pollenizers. randomized complete block design with three replication (trees) and six treatments including open pollination, self pollination, mission, conservalia, sevilana and valanolia...

In order to compare the efficiency of morphological traits and molecular markers in distinguishing the Consolida species, molecular analysis using nrDNA ITS and cpDNA trnL-trnF with maximum parsimony and Bayesian methods were done in a total of 34 species and forma representing 28 species of Consolida, 6 species of Aconitella, plus two species of Delphinium and two species of Aconitum as out gr...

the objective of this study was to compare six statistical methods for prediction of genomic breedingvalues for traits with different genetic architecture in term of gene effects distributions and number ofquantitative traits loci (qtls). a genome consisted of 500 bi-allelic single nucleotide polymorphism(snp) markers distributed over a chromosomes with 100 cm length was simulated. three differ...

SUMMARY forqs is a forward-in-time simulation of recombination, quantitative traits and selection. It was designed to investigate haplotype patterns resulting from scenarios where substantial evolutionary change has taken place in a small number of generations due to recombination and/or selection on polygenic quantitative traits. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION forqs is implemented as a comm...

Male genitalia are thought to be particularly rapidly evolving morphological structures, but there have been few quantitative interspecific comparisons between the evolutionary rates of genital and nongenital traits. We characterize the morphology of hemipenes in 25 Caribbean Anolis lizard species, and compare rates of hemipenial evolution to those of traits related to ecology or visual signali...

Over the past 30 years, the characteristics that have made the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans one of the premier animal model systems have also allowed it to emerge as a powerful model system for determining the genetic basis of quantitative traits, particularly for the identification of naturally segregating and/or lab-adapted alleles with large phenotypic effects. To better understand the ge...

Genetic mapping studies of quantitative traits typically focus on detecting loci that contribute additively to trait variation. Genetic interactions are often proposed as a contributing factor to trait variation, but the relative contribution of interactions to trait variation is a subject of debate. Here, we use a very large cross between two yeast strains to accurately estimate the fraction o...

To date, most genetic progress for quantitative traits in livestock has been made by selection on phenotype or on estimates of breeding values (EBV) derived from phenotype, without knowledge of the number of genes that affect the trait or the effects of each gene. In this quantitative genetic approach to genetic improvement, the genetic architecture of traits of interest has essentially been tr...