The Role of DAF-21/Hsp90 in Mouth-Form Plasticity in Pristionchus pacificus.

ABSTRACT: Phenotypic plasticity is increasingly recognized to facilitate adaptive change in plants and animals, including insects, nematodes, and vertebrates. Plasticity can occur as continuous or discrete (polyphenisms) variation. In social insects, for example, in ants, some species have workers of distinct size classes while in other closely related species variation in size may be continuous. Despite the abundance of examples in nature, how discrete morphs are specified remains currently unknown. In theory, polyphenisms might require robustness, whereby the distribution of morphologies would be limited by the same mechanisms that execute buffering from stochastic perturbations, a function attributed to heat-shock proteins of the Hsp90 family. However, this possibility has never been directly tes

SUBMITTER: Sieriebriennikov B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5455966 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature