Conceptualizing the evolutionary quantitative genetics of phenological life-history events: Breeding time as a plastic threshold trait.

ABSTRACT: Successfully predicting adaptive phenotypic responses to environmental changes, and predicting resulting population outcomes, requires that additive genetic (co)variances underlying microevolutionary and plastic responses of key traits are adequately estimated on appropriate quantitative scales. Such estimation in turn requires that focal traits, and their underlying quantitative genetic architectures, are appropriately conceptualized. Here, we highlight that directly analyzing observed phenotypes as continuously distributed quantitative traits can potentially generate biased and misleading estimates of additive genetic variances and individual-by-environment and gene-by-environment interactions, and hence of forms of plasticity and genetic constraints, if in fact the underlying biology is

SUBMITTER: Reid JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9233176 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature