Understanding evolvability
Informations
- Funding country
Norway- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2019
- End date
- 12/31/2023
- Budget
- 1,057,677 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FRIMEDBIO - Independent projects - Medicine, Health Sciences and Biology | Grant | - | - | 1,057,677 EUR |
Abstract
In 2022, The PIs of the project (Pélabon and Hansen) have been finishing the book entitled “Evolvability: A Unifying Concept in Evolutionary Biology?” that will be published in Spring 2023. The book contains 18 chapters that gather the contributions of most participants to the Evolvability project at the Center of Advance Studies in Oslo in 2019 – 2020. Post-doc and PhD funded by the NFR project have contributed to chapters in the book. The work of A. Holstad in Vienna has now ended, and the writing phase has started although some additional analyses are need. We made good progress on the epistasis project where line-cross data were reanalyzed to estimate directional epistasis. The collaboration with G.H. Bolstad (NINA Trondheim) has been fruitful, and we are currently finishing two papers where G.H Bolstad and S. Bourg are lead authors. Directional epistasis occurs when allele substitutions that increase the trait under selection also tend to increase (positive epistasis) or decrease (negative epistasis) the effects on the trait of other allele substitutions. Although epistasis is thought to be important mostly in life history traits such as survival, number and size of offspring, we show in this project that directional epistasis is frequent even for morphological traits, and tend to be negative, that is, towards a decrease in the effect size of allelic substitution when the trait mean increases.