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Classic recessive-or-dominant gene dynamics may not be so simple
New fruit fly research provides the first direct evidence of “dominance reversal,” revealing why pesticide resistance is so hard to eliminate in changing environments.
For scientists, this raises a fundamental puzzle: How do populations maintain the genetic diversity needed to survive future challenges when natural selection should eliminate variants that aren’t useful for long periods? Researchers at Stanford have addressed this puzzle by tracking the evolution of fruit fly populations in an outdoor orchard where they controlled pesticide exposure over time, and paired experiments with mathematical modeling. “What we’re seeing could be a general mechanism for populations to hold on to genetic variants they might need for future environmental shifts,” said Marianthi Karageorgi, who is the lead author and a research scientist in the Petrov Lab.
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