UPI - Genome's involvement in adaptation seen
An organism's adaptation to new environments involves many genes, Canadian researchers say, a finding that may settle a long-standing evolutionary argument. A current debate in the field of evolutionary biology is whether adaptation to new environments is the result of changes in many genes, each having a relatively small effect, or large changes in just a few genes.
Canadian researchers, along with evolutionary geneticists in Switzerland, studied how threespine stickleback fish adapted differently to lake and stream environments in British Columbia, using high-resolution genomic methods to test for genetic differences at thousands of positions scattered across the fishes' genome, º«¹úÂãÎè in Montreal reported Tuesday.
"I suspect that as more and more studies use [high-resolution] methods, the tide of opinion will swerve strongly to the view that adaptation is a complex process that involves many genes spread across diverse places in the genome," º«¹úÂãÎè researcher Andrew Hendry said.