Genetics, development and evolution of adaptive pigmentation in vertebrates
By H. Hoekstra. Heredity, 2006
616 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The study of pigmentation has played an important role in the intersection of evolution, genetics, and developmental biology. Pigmentation's utility as a visible phenotypic marker has resulted in over 100 years of intense study of coat color mutations in laboratory mice, thereby creating an impressive list of candidate genes and an understanding of the developmental mechanisms responsible for the phenotypic effects. Variation in color and pigment patterning has also served as the focus of many classic studies of naturally occurring phenotypic variation in a wide variety of vertebrates, providing some of the most compelling cases for parallel and convergent evolution. Thus, the pigmentation model system holds much promise for understanding the nature of adaptation by linking genetic changes to variation in fitness-related traits. Here, I first discuss the historical role of pigmentation in genetics, development and evolutionary biology. I then discuss recent empirically based studies in vertebrates, which rely on these historical foundations to make connections between genotype and phenotype for ecologically important pigmentation traits. These studies provide insight into the evolutionary process by uncovering the genetic basis of adaptive traits and addressing such long-standing questions in evolutionary biology as (1) are adaptive changes predominantly caused by mutations in regulatory regions or coding regions? (2) is adaptation driven by the fixation of dominant mutations? and (3) to what extent are parallel phenotypic changes caused by similar genetic changes? It is clear that coloration has much to teach us about the molecular basis of organismal diversity, adaptation and the evolutionary process.
Subfields: Cell Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nutrition and Dietetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d6007de38c48e89089c74b169d8bb2ecd52c020
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Citations in the corpus
- Combining population genomics and quantitative genetics: finding the genes underlying ecologically important traits (2008, background): “Additional phenotypes, like pigmentation variation, have been well explored in vertebrate systems, in part because the wealth of genetic and developmental information on pigmentation provides an extensive list of well-characterized candidate loci (Hoekstra, 2006).”
- Adaptive Radiation, Ecological Opportunity, and Evolutionary Determinism (2010, background): “As a result, when species from such clades experience the same selective conditions, they may adapt in genetically and developmentally similar ways (Haldane 1932; Gould 2002; Hoekstra 2006).”
- Morphological skin colour changes in teleosts (2009, background): “The eumelanin biosynthetic pathway is highly conserved among vertebrates and occurs in melanosomes (Slominski et al. 2004; Hoekstra 2006).”
- Role of Anthocyanins in Plant Defence (2008, background): “It should be appreciated, however, that that it has taken zoologists more than a century to understand the defensive role and the genetic mechanisms of pigmentation in animals (Hoekstra 2006); the effort needed to achieve the same progress in botany”
- Aposematic (Warning) Coloration in Plants (2009, positive): “The significant progress made in understanding the defensive role of pigmentation in zoology and the basics of the genetic mechanisms involved took over a century to achieve (e.g., Majerus 1998 ; Ruxton et al. 2004 ; Hoekstra 2006) , and the effort needed to reach the same level of progress in botan”