Novel approach to heritability detection suggests robustness to paternal genotype in a complex morphological trait.

ABSTRACT: Heritable variation is essential for evolution by natural selection. In Neotropical army ants, the ecological role of a given species is linked intimately to the morphological variation within the sterile worker caste. Furthermore, the army ant Eciton burchellii is highly polyandrous, presenting a unique opportunity to explore heritability of morphological traits among related workers sharing the same colonial environment. In order to exploit the features of this organismal system, we generated a large genetic and morphological dataset and applied our new method that employs geometric morphometrics (GM) to detect the heritability of complex morphological traits. After validating our approach with an existing dataset of known heritability, we simulated our ability to detect heritable

SUBMITTER: Winston ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5478049 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature