"The Evolution of Phenotypic Noise"Weinreich, DanielEach generation, biological information is transmitted from zygote to adult during development, and back to the zygote during reproduction. Both channels -- development and reproduction -- are susceptible to noise, which can have phenotypic consequences. And while noise is an inherent feature of information transmission, the statistical features of phenotypic noise can be under heritable control. For example, mutation and recombination rates can vary between lineages, as can the phenotypic effects of new mutation. This raises the question of how natural selection regards variants that influence the magnitude and structure of phenotypic noise in an evolving population. While interest in the evolution of phenotypic noise goes back at least to work by Waddington and by Feldman and colleagues, recent advances in single-cell phenotyping and genotyping have drawn the attention of workers in diverse fields including developmental, systems, protein and network biology as well as in transmission and population genetics. There is also a growing appreciation of importance of phenotypic noise in human disease. I will present what I believe is a novel, generic and principled stochastic framework for understanding the evolution of phenotypic noise. This work has direct connections to previous work on modifier theory, the statistics of gene regulation, the topography of fitness landscapes, protein promiscuity, non-genetic inheritance, biological network theory and the evolution of evolvability. I will conclude by motivating important, open questions for theoreticians, experimentalists and clinical scientists. |
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