Additive genetic variance for traits least related to fitness increases with environmental stress in the desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria.

ABSTRACT: Under environmental stress, previously hidden additive genetic variation can be unmasked and exposed to selection. The amount of hidden variation is expected to be higher for life history traits, which strongly correlate to individual fitness, than for morphological traits, in which fitness effects are more ambiguous. However, no consensual pattern has been recovered yet, and this idea is still debated in the literature. Here, we hypothesize that the classical categorization of traits (i.e., life history and morphology) may fail to capture their proximity to fitness. In the desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, a model organism for the study of insect polyphenism, we quantified changes in additive genetic variation elicited by lifetime thermal stress for ten traits, in which evoluti

SUBMITTER: Chapuis MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8525110 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature