ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2017
The importance of selection in the evolution of blindness in cavefish.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Eyeless cave-dwellingScience advances · 2023Article
- Trait Loss in Evolution: What Cavefish Have Taught Us about Mechanisms Underlying Eye Regression.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Review
- Selection-driven trait loss in independently evolved cavefish populations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Natural selection versus neutral mutation in the evolution of subterranean life: A false dichotomy?Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Biogeography and eye size evolution of the ogre-faced spiders.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- From Cave Dragons to Genomics: Advancements in the Study of Subterranean Tetrapods.Bioscience · 2022Article
- Dark world rises: The emergence of cavefish as a model for the study of evolution, development, behavior, and disease.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundBlindness has evolved repeatedly in cave-dwelling organisms, and many hypotheses have been proposed to explain this observation, including both accumulation of neutral loss-of-function mutations and adaptation to darkness. Investigating the loss of sight in cave dwellers presents an opportunity to understand the operation of fundamental evolutionary processes, including drift, selection, mutation, and migration.
resultsHere we model the evolution of blindness in caves. This model captures the interaction of three forces: (1) selection favoring alleles causing blindness, (2) immigration of sightedness alleles from a surface population, and (3) mutations creating blindness alleles. We investigated the dynamics of this model and determined selection-strength thresholds that result in blindness evolving in caves despite immigration of sightedness alleles from the surface. We estimate that the selection coefficient for blindness would need to be at least 0.005 (and maybe as high as 0.5) for blindness to evolve in the model cave-organism, Astyanax mexicanus.
conclusionsOur results indicate that strong selection is required for the evolution of blindness in cave-dwelling organisms, which is consistent with recent work suggesting a high metabolic cost of eye development.
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