ReviewAnnals of botany2016
Genetic assimilation: a review of its potential proximate causes and evolutionary consequences.
Review in Annals of botany, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trans-Generational Morphological Trait Plasticity in Parthenogenetic Offspring of TwoEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Emerging Orchestrator of Ecological Adaptation: mMolecular ecology · 2025Review
- Article
- Outside your shell: exploring genetic variation in two congeneric marine snails across a latitude and temperature gradient.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- A mechanistic basis for genetic assimilation in natural fly populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Flame-forged divergence? Ancient human fires and the evolution of diurnal and nocturnal lineages in moorish geckos.iScience · 2025Article
- Evolution in changing seas: The loss of plasticity under predator invasion and warming oceans.Science advances · 2025Article
- Variable stressor exposure shapes fitness within and across generations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Review
- Changes in DNA methylation contribute to rapid adaptation in bacterial plant pathogen evolution.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Local adaptation to an altitudinal gradient: the interplay between mean phenotypic trait variation and phenotypic plasticity inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Thermal Adaptations in Animals: Genes, Development, and Evolution.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2024Review
- A histone demethylase links the loss of plasticity to nongenetic inheritance and morphological change.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A theoretical perspective on Waddington's genetic assimilation experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Plasticity-led evolution as an intrinsic property of developmental gene regulatory networks.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Alternative Splicing Variation: Accessing and Exploiting in Crop Improvement Programs.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Transcriptomic analysis reveals the rareness of genetic assimilation of gene expression in environmental adaptations.Science advances · 2023Article
- Environmentally robustProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Simultaneous warming and acidification limit population fitness and reveal phenotype costs for a marine copepod.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMost, if not all, organisms possess the ability to alter their phenotype in direct response to changes in their environment, a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity. Selection can break this environmental sensitivity, however, and cause a formerly environmentally induced trait to evolve to become fixed through a process called genetic assimilation. Essentially, genetic assimilation can be viewed as the evolution of environmental robustness in what was formerly an environmentally sensitive trait. Because genetic assimilation has long been suggested to play a key role in the origins of phenotypic novelty and possibly even new species, identifying and characterizing the proximate mechanisms that underlie genetic assimilation may advance our basic understanding of how novel traits and species evolve. SCOPE: This review begins by discussing how the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, followed by genetic assimilation, might promote the origins of new traits and possibly fuel speciation and adaptive radiation. The evidence implicating genetic assimilation in evolutionary innovation and diversification is then briefly considered. Next, the potential causes of phenotypic plasticity generally and genetic assimilation specifically are examined at the genetic, molecular and physiological levels and approaches that can improve our understanding of these mechanisms are described. The review concludes by outlining major challenges for future work.
conclusionsIdentifying and characterizing the proximate mechanisms involved in phenotypic plasticity and genetic assimilation promises to help advance our basic understanding of evolutionary innovation and diversification.
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