Heterosis: Many Genes, Many Mechanisms—End the Search for an Undiscovered Unifying Theory
By Shawn M. Kaeppler. 2012
112 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Heterosis is the increase in vigor that is observed in progenies of matings of diverse individuals from different species, isolated populations, or selected strains within species or populations. Heterosis has been of immense economic value in agriculture and has important implications regarding the fitness and fecundity of individuals in natural populations. Genetic models based on complementation of deleterious alleles, especially in the context of linkage and epistasis, are consistent with many observed manifestations of heterosis. The search for the genes and alleles that underlie heterosis, as well as for broader allele-independent, genomewide mechanisms, has encompassed many species and systems. Common themes across these studies indicate that sequence diversity is necessary but not sufficient to produce heterotic phenotypes, and that the molecular pathways that produce heterosis involve chromatin modification, transcriptional control, translation and protein processing, and interactions between and within developmental and biochemical pathways. Taken together, there are many and diverse molecular mechanisms that translate DNA into phenotype, and it is the combination of all these mechanisms across many genes that produce heterosis in complex traits.
Subfields: Genetics, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cec319eb9bc3a4e5c7cfe1b832862ef02fcd962b
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In Genetics
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Rapeseed (Brassica napus): Processing, Utilization, and Genetic Improvement (2021, background): “Moreover, genetic diversity (GD), reproductivity of parents, adaptability, studied traits, and environmental parameters affect heterosis [335–337], but GD has been thought as insufficient to increase heterosis level [338].”
- Marker-Assisted Plant Breeding: Principles and Practices (2015, background): “Therefore, the following genome-wide mechanisms have been proposed for heterosis: (1) gene dosage balance; (2) epigenetic mechanisms, including DNA methylation; and (3) increased energy efficiency hypotheses (Kaeppler 2012; Schnable and Springer 2013).”