Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

pleiotropy: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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pleiotropy1 CONSTRUCTPleiotropyPLATE · MANY TRAITS

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Genetics

One gene influencing two or more unrelated traits

The German zoologist Ludwig Plate coined the term pleiotropie in 1910 to name the case in which a single gene, the unit of heredity, influences two or more distinct and often unrelated traits of an organism. A trait here is any measurable feature, from a pigment to a behaviour, and pleiotropy holds when one genetic cause reaches several such features at once rather than only one. George C. Williams (1957) gave the construct its most cited evolutionary form, antagonistic pleiotropy, in which one gene raises fitness early in life while lowering it later, an argument that grounds a leading genetic account of why organisms age. What makes pleiotropy a landmark is its scope: it ties a single locus to a spread of phenotypic effects, so it constrains how independently traits can evolve and recurs across the study of development, disease, and senescence. It is identified when variation at one gene is shown to change several phenotypes together.[1][2][3]

Unit
A property of a gene: the number of distinct phenotypic traits it affects
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified when variation at one gene changes several traits together, through mutation and knockout studies or genome-wide association across multiple phenotypes

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Nearby constructs

phenotype4 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsallele3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsmutation4 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, four constructs

References

  1. Plate, L. (1910). Vererbungslehre und Deszendenztheorie. In Festschrift zum sechzigsten Geburtstag Richard Hertwigs (Vol. 2, pp. 537–610). Gustav Fischer.
  2. Williams, G. C. (1957). Pleiotropy, natural selection, and the evolution of senescence. Evolution, 11(4), 398–411. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1957.tb02911.x
  3. Stearns, F. W. (2010). One hundred years of pleiotropy: A retrospective. Genetics, 186(3), 767–773. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.110.122549

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