epistasis
Jarvis JP & Cheverud JM 2009 Epistasis and the evolutionary dynamics of measured genotypic values during simulated serial bottlenecks. J Evol Biol 22:1658-1668.
- the evolutionary effects of epistasis have been primarily explored analytically and most empirical studies have utilized yeast, viral and bacterial populations
- we analyzed two-locus genotypic values at quantitative trait loci, which provides an especially detailed view of epistatic architectures, to evaluate their predicted evolutionary consequences
- all traits show complicated genetic architectures which are largely hidden in single locus QTL scans
- on average, detected epistatic effects are comparable in size to marginal effects
- simulations demonstrate an expected preservation, and often inflation, of heritable variance across several generations of small effective population size for many identified epistatic pairs
- while the existence of complex physiological interactions among alleles at many loci during development is unequivocal, the evolutionary relevance of this complexity remains quite controversial
- much of the discussion concerning drift-epistasis interactions has proceeded analytically via simplifying assumptions regarding critical parameter values
- such as the magnitude of genotypic values, epistatic effect sizes, the allele frequency distribution in the base population, the expected pattern of linkage disequilibrium, the system of mating et cetera
