Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Phenotypic diversity is not uniformly distributed, but how biased patterns of evolutionary variation are generated and whether common developmental mechanisms are responsible remains debatable. High-level ‘rules’ of self-organization and assembly are increasingly used to model organismal development, even when the underlying cellular or molecular players are unknown. One such rule, the inhibitory cascade, predicts that proportions of segmental series derive from the relative strengths of activating and inhibitory interactions acting on both local and global scales. Here we show that this developmental design rule explains population-level variation in segment proportions, their response to artificial selection and experimental blockade of putative signals and macroevolutionary diversity in limbs, digits and somites. Together with evidence from teeth, these results indicate that segmentation across independent developmental modules shares a common regulatory ‘logic’, which has a predictable impact on both their short and long-term evolvability. Despite apparent morphological diversity, developmental interactions create predictable patterns of variation. Here the authors show that variation in the proportion of limbs, digits and somites and their response to artificial selection follow a rule that predicts the size of sequentially forming structures.
Source: Nature Communications
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7690
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,990
OpenAlex ID: W1968056527