ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Plastic responses to novel environments are biased towards phenotype dimensions with high additive genetic variation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analysis reveals that phenotypic plasticity and divergent selection promote reproductive isolation during incipient speciation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Pooled it
- Increased adaptive potential in novel environments can be predicted from genetic variance in development time expressed in native environments.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Bridging developmental and statistical approaches to variation and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- New approaches to meta-analyze differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Adaptive evolution can mitigate the negative effects of temperature stress on plant-pollinator interactions.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Evolvability: progress and key questions.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Ecotypic divergence in Mongolian Scots pine persists via large-effect genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity.BMC plant biology · 2025Article
- Uncovering the role of chemical pollutants in shaping biological invasions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Predicting the contribution of single trait evolution to rescuing a plant population from demographic impacts of climate change.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Developmental lines of least resistance predict standing genetic covariation but do not constrain plasticity or rapid evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Congruence between noise and plasticity in protein expression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Conserved wing shape variation across biological scales unveils dialectical relationships between micro- and macroevolution.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Cold tolerance strategies of freshwater mussels across latitudes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Phenotypic plasticity co-varies with elevational range in two avian species of elevational migrants in the Himalayas.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Haplotype-resolved chromosomal-level genome assembly of Prunus mahaleb.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Consequences of developmental and growth-rate plasticity within and across life stages in wood frogs (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Genetic properties underlying transcriptional variability across different perturbations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Can spatial self-organization inhibit evolutionary adaptation?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- The potential for evolutionary rescue in an Arctic seashore plant threatened by climate change.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Promoters Constrain Evolution of Expression Levels of Essential Genes in Escherichia coli.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Environmentally induced phenotypes have been proposed to initiate and bias adaptive evolutionary change toward particular directions. The potential for this to happen depends in part on how well plastic responses are aligned with the additive genetic variance and covariance in traits. Using meta-analysis, we demonstrate that plastic responses to novel environments tend to occur along phenotype dimensions that harbor substantial amounts of additive genetic variation. This suggests that selection for or against environmentally induced phenotypes typically will be effective. One interpretation of the alignment between the direction of plasticity and the main axis of additive genetic variation is that developmental systems tend to respond to environmental novelty as they do to genetic mutation. This makes it challenging to distinguish if the direction of evolution is biased by plasticity or genetic "constraint." Our results therefore highlight a need for new theoretical and empirical approaches to address the role of plasticity in evolution.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.