ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2011
Phenotypic plasticity can facilitate adaptive evolution in gene regulatory circuits.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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40 citing papers in PubMed, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Gene function predicts divergence across molecular levels.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A Computational Ecological Genetic Model of Phenotypic Plasticity in Species Interactions.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Utilizing developmental dynamics for evolutionary prediction and control.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- The Boltzmann distributions of molecular structures predict likely changes through random mutations.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Plasticity-led evolution as an intrinsic property of developmental gene regulatory networks.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The non-deterministic genotype-phenotype map of RNA secondary structure.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Not Quite Lost in Translation: Mistranslation Alters Adaptive Landscape Topography and the Dynamics of Evolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Computational modelling of plasticity-led evolution.Biophysical reviews · 2022Review
- The phenotypic plasticity of an evolving digital organism.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Emerging Role of Chimeric RNAs in Cell Plasticity and Adaptive Evolution of Cancer Cells.Cancers · 2021Review
- Signaling pathways have an inherent need for noise to acquire information.BMC bioinformatics · 2020Article
- Seasonal Variation in Genome-Wide DNA Methylation Patterns and the Onset of Seasonal Timing of Reproduction in Great Tits.Genome biology and evolution · 2019Article
- Review
- On the networked architecture of genotype spaces and its critical effects on molecular evolution.Open biology · 2018Review
- Does pathogen plasticity facilitate host shifts?PLoS pathogens · 2018Article
- Modulation of yellow expression contributes to thermal plasticity of female abdominal pigmentation in Drosophila melanogaster.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMany important evolutionary adaptations originate in the modification of gene regulatory circuits to produce new gene activity phenotypes. How do evolving populations sift through an astronomical number of circuits to find circuits with new adaptive phenotypes? The answer may often involve phenotypic plasticity. Phenotypic plasticity allows a genotype to produce different - alternative - phenotypes after non-genetic perturbations that include gene expression noise, environmental change, or epigenetic modification.
resultsWe here analyze a well-studied model of gene regulatory circuits. A circuit's genotype encodes the regulatory interactions among circuit genes, and its phenotype corresponds to a stable gene activity pattern the circuit forms. For this model, we study how genotypes are arranged in genotype space, where the distance between two genotypes reflects the number of regulatory mutations that set those genotypes apart. Specifically, we address whether this arrangement favors adaptive evolution mediated by plasticity. We find that plasticity facilitates the origin of genotypes that produce a new phenotype in response to non-genetic perturbations. We also find that selection can then stabilize the new phenotype genetically, allowing it to become a circuit's dominant gene expression phenotype. These are generic properties of the circuits we study here.
conclusionsTaken together, our observations suggest that phenotypic plasticity frequently facilitates the evolution of novel beneficial gene activity patterns in gene regulatory circuits.
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