Tag: Evolution

Climate and Developmental Plasticity: Interannual Variability in Grapevine Leaf Morphology

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Author: Chitwood, DH; Rundell, SM; Li, DY; Woodford, QL; Yu, TT; Lopez, JR; Greenblatt, D; Kang, J; Londo, JP Description: The shapes of leaves are dynamic, changing over evolutionary time between species, within a single plant producing different shaped leaves at successive nodes, during the development of a single leaf as it allometrically expands, and in response to the environment. Notably, strong correlations between the dissection and size of leaves with temperature and precipitation exist in both the paleorecord and extant populations. Yet, a morphometric model integrating evolutionary, developmental, and…

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Estimating the capacity of Chamaecrista fasciculata for adaptation to change in precipitation

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Author: Peschel, AR; Boehm, EL; Shaw, RG Description: Adaptation through natural selection may be the only means by which small and fragmented plant populations will persist through present day environmental change. A population’s additive genetic variance for fitness (V(A) (W)) represents its immediate capacity to adapt to the environment in which it exists. We evaluated this property for a population of the annual legume Chamaecrista fasciculata through a quantitative genetic experiment in the tallgrass prairie region of the Midwestern United States, where changing climate is predicted to include more variability…

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The origin of viruses and their possible roles in major evolutionary transitions

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Author: Forterre, Patrick Description: Viruses infecting cells from the three domains of life, Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya, share homologous features, suggesting that viruses originated very early in the evolution of life. The three current hypotheses for virus origin, e.g. the virus first, the escape and the reduction hypotheses are revisited in this new framework. Theoretical considerations suggest that RNA viruses may have originated in the nucleoprotein world by escape or reduction from RNA-cells, whereas DNA viruses (at least some of them) might have evolved directly from RNA viruses. The antiquity…

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Peto’s Paradox: evolution’s prescription for cancer prevention

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Author: Caulin, A.F.; Maley, C.C. Description: The evolution of multicellularity required the suppression of cancer. If every cell has some chance of becoming cancerous, large, long-lived organisms should have an increased risk of developing cancer compared with small, short-lived organisms. The lack of correlation between body size and cancer risk is known as Peto’s paradox. Animals with 1000 times more cells than humans do not exhibit an increased cancer risk, suggesting that natural mechanisms can suppress cancer 1000 times more effectively than is done in human cells. Because cancer has…

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