Chapter category: Gene Expression
From Beanbag Genetics to Feedback Genetics: Bridging the Gap between Regulatory Biology and Quantitative Genetics Theory
The Biology of Genetic Dominance
Edited by: Reiner A. VeitiaISBN: 1-58706-288-7
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Chapter authors:
Stig W. Omholt
This chapter addresses the abyss that currently exists between quantitative genetics theory and regulatory biology. My claim is that despite the apparent success of quantiative genetics within evolutionary biology and production biology, the conceptual and methodological foundation of the theory as such needs a major revision if we are to hope for development of a genetics theory that is capable of actually linking genes, phenotypes and population level genetic phenomena in a causal explanatory structure. I predict that nonlinear system dynamics will make up a major part of the core of the mathematical foundation of such a future theory. The simple reason for this is that statistics is not an adequate language to describe and analyse how emergent dynamic phenomena (i.e. phenotypes) are generated by the interactions of lower-level systemic entities. As a proof of principle of the plausibility of the above considerations I analyse the phenomenon of genetic dominance. By acknowledging that genes interact in feedback structures, and making use of an appropriate mathematical language to describe and analyse such genetic structures, a whole new research field within the disciplinary frames of quantitative genetics opens up.
Additional chapters from this book:
Lessons from a Genetic Network about the Causes of Dominance
Andreas Wagner
I review recent findings from the stoichiometric analysis of metabolic networks. These findings show that the physiological theory of dominance, which explains dominance in metabolic genes from kineti...
Mathematical Models of Haploinsufficiency
Indrani Bose and Rajesh Karmakar
We describe simple mathematical models of gene expression to explore the possible origins of haploinsufficiency (HI). In a diploid organism, each gene exists in two copies and when one of these is mut...
Phenomenology and Mechanistics of Dominance
Reiner Veitia and Bruno Bost
Here we explore the phenomenological and mechanistic bases of dominance. Dominance can be defined as an operational measure of the deviation of the heterozygote’s observed trait value from its expec...
Phenotype and Stochastic Gene Expression: Can the Noise Cause Haploinsufficiency?
Anthony N. Gerber, D.L. Cook and S.J. Tapscott
Growing evidence suggests that genes are not expressed at steady state levels, but instead, gene transcription has a stochastic component. We review recent literature concerning stochastic gene expre...
The Basis of Dominance
Athel Cornish-Bowden and Vidyanand Nanjundiah
Dominance is the masking at the level of the phenotype of the presence of one of the two alleles at a diploid locus. We discuss whether it could be an automatic consequence of cellular physiology, a...
Biological Consequences of Dosage Dependent Gene Regulation in Multicellular Eukaryotes
James A. Birchler and Donald L. Auger
Recent evidence from a variety of studies has indicated that gene regulatory mechanisms in multicellular eukaryotes operate in a dosage dependent manner. A consequence of this fact is that new mutat...
From Beanbag Genetics to Feedback Genetics: Bridging the Gap between Regulatory Biology and Quantitative Genetics Theory
Stig W. Omholt
This chapter addresses the abyss that currently exists between quantitative genetics theory and regulatory biology. My claim is that despite the apparent success of quantiative genetics within evoluti...
Stochastic Gene Expression: Dominance, Thresholds and Boundaries
H. Frederik Nijhout
Butterfly color patterns are built as finely tiles mosaics of colored scales, each the product of a single epidermal cell. The overall pattern is composed of a small number of pigments. Each scale a...
Clusters of Functionally Related Genes in Eukaryotes, Dosage Balance and Evolvability
Reiner A. Veitia
There is growing genomic evidence on clustering of functionally related genes in eukaryotes. Recent studies in yeast show a correlation between the expression patterns of adjacent and nonadjacent pa...
Dominance, Nonlinear Developmental Mapping and Developmental Stability
Christian Peter Klingenberg
Developmental stability is the ability of organisms to buffer against the random variation that arises spontaneously as a consequence of stochastic variation in the cellular processes that are invol...
