Genomic imprinting affects a subset of genes in mammals, such that they are expressed in a monoallelic, parent-of-origin-specific manner. These genes are regulated by imprinting control regions (ICRs), cis-regulatory elements that exhibit allele-specific differential DNA methylation. Although genomic imprinting is conserved in mammals, ICRs are genetically divergent across species. This raises ...

Keywords Androgenetic Embryo An embryo with two paternal genomes, and no maternal genome, produced by nuclear transplantation. Chromatin DNA packaged around nucleosomes. The degree of packaging differs between active (euchromatic) and inactive (heterochromatic) chromosomal regions.

IN its simplest form, the genetic-conflict hypothesis players are alleles at a locus, strategies are the alleles’ patterns of expression, and an unbeatable (Hamilton for the evolution of genomic imprinting posits that multiple paternity of a female’s offspring, in combina1967) or evolutionarily stable strategy (Maynard Smith and Price 1973) is a pattern of expression, which, when tion with post...

Among animals, genomic imprinting is a uniquely mammalian phenomenon in which certain genes are monoallelically expressed according to their parent of origin. This silencing of certain alleles often involves differential methylation at regulatory regions associated with imprinted genes and must be recapitulated at every generation with the erasure and reapplication of these epigenetic marks in ...

In some mammalian genes, the paternally and maternally derived alleles are expressed differently: this phenomenon is called genomic imprinting. Here we study the evolution of imprinting using multivariate quantitative genetic models to examine the feasibility of the genetic conflict hypothesis. This hypothesis explains the observed imprinting patterns as an evolutionary outcome of the conflict ...

Genomic imprinting is the phenomenon whereby some genes preferentially produce mRNA transcripts from the gene copy derived from the parent of a specific sex. It has been implicated in a number of human diseases (most of them of endocrine interest), such as Prader-Willi/Angelman syndromes, Silver-Russell syndrome, Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, transient neonatal diabetes, the focal form of nesidi...

Genomic imprinting is the phenomenon where the expression of a locus differs between the maternally and paternally inherited alleles. Typically, this manifests as transcriptional silencing of one of the alleles, although many genes are imprinted in a tissue- or isoform-specific manner. Diseases associated with imprinted genes include various cancers, disorders of growth and metabolism, and diso...

We explore three possible pathways for the evolution of genomic imprinting. (1) Imprinting may be advantageous in itself when imprinted and unimprinted alleles of a locus confer different phenotypes. If a segment of DNA is imprinted in the gametes of one sex but not in those of the other, it might lead to effects correlated with sexual dimorphism. More fundamentally, in certain organisms, sex d...

Imprinted genes exhibit a parent-of-origin specific pattern of expression. Such genes have been shown to be targets of molecular defects in particular genetic syndromes such as Beckwith-Wiedemann and Angelman syndromes. Recent reports have raised concern about the possibility that assisted reproduction techniques, such as in vitro fertilization or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, might cause g...