There is increasing evidence that heritable variation in gene expression underlies genetic variation in susceptibility to disease. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the similarity between relatives for transcript variation is warranted--in particular, dissection of phenotypic variation into additive and non-additive genetic factors and shared environmental effects. We conducted a gene...

Analyzing the pattern and causes of phenotypic and genetic variation within and among populations might help to understand life history variability in plants, and to predict their responses to changing environmental conditions. Here we compare phenotypic variation and genetic diversity of the widespread herb Plantago coronopus across Europe, and evaluate their relationship with environmental an...

Environmental variation plays a central role in regulating processes at all levels of ecological organization. Environmental data (e.g., temperature, rainfall, stream discharge, water chemistry) are typically easy to collect in large quantity, a requirement for many datahungry time series tools. Unfortunately, these data are very rarely used effectively in ecology. Here we address this problem ...

Populations often differ in phenotype and these differences can be caused by adaptation by natural selection, random neutral processes, and environmental responses. The most straightforward way to divide mechanisms that influence phenotypic variation is heritable variation and environmental-induced variation (e.g., plasticity). While genetic variation is responsible for most heritable phenotypi...

introduction the exposure of human beings to ionizing radiation from natural sources is a continuing and inescapable feature of life on earth. for most individuals, this exposure exceeds that from all man-made sources combined. materials and methods in this study, the annual effective dose in high level environmental background radiation areas (hlebras) of northern city of ramsar in iran was de...

What is the relationship between genetic or environmental variation and the variation in messenger RNA (mRNA) expression? To address this, microarrays were used to examine the effect of genetic and environmental variation on cardiac mRNA expression for metabolic genes in three groups of Fundulus heteroclitus: (i) individuals sampled in the field (field), (ii) field individuals acclimated for 6 ...