ArticlePLoS genetics2005
Maternal expression relaxes constraint on innovation of the anterior determinant, bicoid.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparative Genomics of Sex-Determination-Related Genes Reveals Shared Evolutionary Patterns Between Bivalves and Mammals, but Not Fruit Flies.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Maternal-Offspring Interactions: Reciprocally Coevolving Social Environments.The Journal of heredity · 2022Article
- When is Offspring Viability Fitness a Measure of Paternal Fitness and When is it not?The Journal of heredity · 2022Article
- The genetic architecture underlying prey-dependent performance in a microbial predator.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Primordial Germ Cell Specification in Vertebrate Embryos: Phylogenetic Distribution and Conserved Molecular Features of Preformation and Induction.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Evolution and Developmental System Drift in the Endoderm Gene Regulatory Network ofFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2020Review
- When mother knows best: A population genetic model of transgenerational versus intragenerational plasticity.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Conditional expression explains molecular evolution of social genes in a microbe.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Nonfertilizing sperm in Lepidoptera show little evidence for recurrent positive selection.Molecular ecology · 2019Article
- Evolution of maternal and zygotic mRNA complements in the early Drosophila embryo.PLoS genetics · 2018Article
- A feed-forward relay integrates the regulatory activities of Bicoid and Orthodenticle via sequential binding to suboptimal sites.Genes & development · 2018Article
- Maternal loading of a small heat shock protein increases embryo thermal tolerance inThe Journal of experimental biology · 2017Article
- Holding it together: rapid evolution and positive selection in the synaptonemal complex of Drosophila.BMC evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Evolutionary genetics of maternal effects.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- The evolution of sperm competition genes: The effect of mating system on levels of genetic variation within and between species.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- Sexual selection drives evolution and rapid turnover of male gene expression.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Accelerated evolution of morph-biased genes in pea aphids.Molecular biology and evolution · 2014Article
- A phyletically rare gene promotes the niche-specific fitness of an E. coli pathogen during bacteremia.PLoS pathogens · 2013Article
- Positive selection in nucleoporins challenges constraints on early expressed genes in Drosophila development.Genome biology and evolution · 2013Article
- Identification of maternally-loaded RNA transcripts in unfertilized eggs of Tribolium castaneum.BMC genomics · 2012Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The origin of evolutionary novelty is believed to involve both positive selection and relaxed developmental constraint. In flies, the redesign of anterior patterning during embryogenesis is a major developmental innovation and the rapidly evolving Hox gene, bicoid (bcd), plays a critical role. We report evidence for relaxation of selective constraint acting on bicoid as a result of its maternal pattern of gene expression. Evolutionary theory predicts 2-fold greater sequence diversity for maternal effect genes than for zygotically expressed genes, because natural selection is only half as effective acting on autosomal genes expressed in one sex as it is on genes expressed in both sexes. We sample an individual from ten populations of Drosophila melanogaster and nine populations of D. simulans for polymorphism in the tandem gene duplicates bcd, which is maternally expressed, and zerknüllt (zen), which is zygotically expressed. In both species, we find the ratio of bcd to zen nucleotide diversity to be two or more in the coding regions but one in the noncoding regions, providing the first quantitative support for the theoretical prediction of relaxed selective constraint on maternal-effect genes resulting from sex-limited expression. Our results suggest that the accelerated rate of evolution observed for bcd is owing, at least partly, to variation generated by relaxed selective constraint.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.