ReviewBiophysical reviews2018
Mechanism of evolution by genetic assimilation : Equivalence and independence of genetic mutation and epigenetic modulation in phenotypic expression.
Review in Biophysical reviews, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Introducing the EpGEpigenomes · 2025Article
- Reversibility of sex changes in the plant kingdom: more important than we thought?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Introduction of epigenetic variation contribute to resistance against the human parasite Schistosoma mansoni.Epigenetics & chromatin · 2025Article
- Epigenetics and individuality: from concepts to causality across timescales.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Molecular mechanisms underlying the evolution of a color polyphenism by genetic accommodation in the tobacco hornworm,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Evolution of Plasticity in Brain Morphology.Brain, behavior and evolution · 2025Review
- The evolutionary consequences of interactions between the epigenome, the genome and the environment.Evolutionary applications · 2024Review
- Epigenetic and Genetic Differentiation Between Coregonus Species Pairs.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- A histone demethylase links the loss of plasticity to nongenetic inheritance and morphological change.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Plasticity-led evolution as an intrinsic property of developmental gene regulatory networks.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bacteria evolve macroscopic multicellularity by the genetic assimilation of phenotypically plastic cell clustering.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Computational modelling of plasticity-led evolution.Biophysical reviews · 2022Review
- "Natural Laboratory Complex" for novel primate neuroscience.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mitochondrial Short-Term Plastic Responses and Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics in Animal Species.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Review
- An evolutionary approach to clonally complex hematologic disorders.Blood cancer discovery · 2021Review
- Long-Term m5C Methylome Dynamics Parallel Phenotypic Adaptation in the Cyanobacterium Trichodesmium.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Bridging Tumorigenesis and Therapy Resistance With a Non-Darwinian and Non-Lamarckian Mechanism of Adaptive Evolution.Frontiers in oncology · 2021Article
- Dyslexia as an adaptation to cortico-limbic stress system reactivity.Neurobiology of stress · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conrad H. Waddington discovered the phenomenon of genetic assimilation through a series of experiments on fruit flies. In those experiments, artificially exerted environmental stress induced plastic phenotypic changes in the fruit flies, but after some generations, the same phenotypic variant started to appear without the environmental stress. Both the initial state (where the phenotypic changes were environmentally induced and plastic) and the final state (where the phenotypic changes were genetically fixed and constitutive) are experimental facts. However, it remains unclear how the environmentally induced phenotypic change in the first generation becomes genetically fixed in the central process of genetic assimilation itself. We have argued that the key to understanding the mechanism of genetic assimilation lies in epigenetics, and proposed the "cooperative model" in which the evolutionary process depends on both genetic and epigenetic factors. Evolutionary simulations based on the cooperative model reproduced the process of genetic assimilation. Detailed analysis of the trajectories has revealed genetic assimilation is a process in which epigenetically induced phenotypic changes are incrementally and statistically replaced with multiple minor genetic mutations through natural selection. In this scenario, epigenetic and genetic changes may be considered as mutually independent but equivalent in terms of their effects on phenotypic changes. This finding rejects the common (and confused) hypothesis that epigenetically induced phenotypic changes depend on genetic mutations. Furthermore, we argue that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is not required for evolution by genetic assimilation.
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