Back

Shaping of developmental gradients through selection on multiple loci in Antirrhinum

Bradley, D.; Boell, L.; Richardson, D. M.; Copsey, L.; Whibley, A.; Xu, T.; Zhang, Y.; Xue, Y.; Field, D.; Coen, E.

2025-02-17 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2025.02.12.637738 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Development depends on precise shaping of molecular gradients, but how natural selection acts to establish precision is unknown. Here we analyse genes that control differences in the gradient of yellow flower colour between two varieties of snapdragon (Antirrhinum). We show that these differences depend, in part, on cis regulatory variation in the pigment biosynthetic gene, FLAVIA (FLA). FLA interacts multiplicatively with three other loci, one of which is a trans-acting regulator of FLA, to further shape the yellow gradient. All the loci exhibit clines at a hybrid zone, with widths that correlate with phenotypic effect, showing how selection can hone gradient shape with remarkable precision by acting on cis and trans variation at multiple loci.

Published in Science Advances (predicted rank #8) · training set

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.