34
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      What are maternal effects (and what are they not)?

      1 , 2
      Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
      The Royal Society

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Maternal effects can play an important role in a diversity of ecological and evolutionary processes such as population dynamics, phenotypic plasticity, niche construction, life-history evolution and the evolutionary response to selection. However, although maternal effects were defined by quantitative geneticists well over half a century ago, there remains some confusion over exactly what phenomena should be characterized as maternal effects and, more importantly, why it matters and how they are defined. We suggest a definition of maternal effects as the causal influence of the maternal genotype or phenotype on the offspring phenotype. This definition differs from some definitions in that it treats maternal effects as a phenomenon, not as a statistical construct. The causal link to maternal genotype or phenotype is the critical component of this definition providing the link between maternal effects and evolutionary and ecological processes. We show why phenomena such as maternal cytoplasmic inheritance and genomic imprinting are distinct genetically from and have different evolutionary consequences than true maternal effects. We also argue that one should consider cases where the maternal effect is conditional on offspring genotype as a class of maternal effects.

          Related collections

          Most cited references46

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior.

          Here we report that increased pup licking and grooming (LG) and arched-back nursing (ABN) by rat mothers altered the offspring epigenome at a glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene promoter in the hippocampus. Offspring of mothers that showed high levels of LG and ABN were found to have differences in DNA methylation, as compared to offspring of 'low-LG-ABN' mothers. These differences emerged over the first week of life, were reversed with cross-fostering, persisted into adulthood and were associated with altered histone acetylation and transcription factor (NGFI-A) binding to the GR promoter. Central infusion of a histone deacetylase inhibitor removed the group differences in histone acetylation, DNA methylation, NGFI-A binding, GR expression and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) responses to stress, suggesting a causal relation among epigenomic state, GR expression and the maternal effect on stress responses in the offspring. Thus we show that an epigenomic state of a gene can be established through behavioral programming, and it is potentially reversible.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            The adaptive significance of maternal effects

            T Mousseau (1998)
            Recently, the adaptive significance of maternal effects has been increasingly recognized. No longer are maternal effects relegated as simple `troublesome sources of environmental resemblance' that confound our ability to estimate accurately the genetic basis of traits of interest. Rather, it has become evident that many maternal effects have been shaped by the action of natural selection to act as a mechanism for adaptive phenotypic response to environmental heterogeneity. Consequently, maternal experience is translated into variation in offspring fitness.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Maternal Effects in Animal Ecology

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B
                The Royal Society
                0962-8436
                1471-2970
                March 12 2009
                April 27 2009
                March 12 2009
                April 27 2009
                : 364
                : 1520
                : 1107-1115
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Faculty of Life Sciences, University of ManchesterMichael Smith Building, Manchester M13 9PT, UK
                [2 ]Department of Biology, Indiana UniversityJordan Hall, 1001 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-3700, USA
                Article
                10.1098/rstb.2008.0238
                2666680
                19324615
                e3ee59b8-2436-44e6-af81-1f4b9ebcad82
                © 2009
                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article