How demography, life history, and kinship shape the evolution of genomic imprinting.

ABSTRACT: How phenomena like helping, dispersal, or the sex ratio evolve depends critically on demographic and life-history factors. One phenotype that is of particular interest to biologists is genomic imprinting, which results in parent-of-origin-specific gene expression and thus deviates from the predictions of Mendel's rules. The most prominent explanation for the evolution of genomic imprinting, the kinship theory, originally specified that multiple paternity can cause the evolution of imprinting when offspring affect maternal resource provisioning. Most models of the kinship theory do not detail how population subdivision, demography, and life history affect the evolution of imprinting. In this work, we embed the classic kinship theory within an island model of population structure and allow f

SUBMITTER: Van Cleve J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2989731 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature