What is phenotypic trade off?

An example of a phenotypic trade-off is the behavioral choice an animal makes when it stays to feed in an area (“patch”) or leaves the patch, between safe but less feeding and finding a better patch but running the risk of being detected by a predator.

Can phenotypic plasticity evolve?

If the optimal phenotype in a given environment changes with environmental conditions, then the ability of individuals to express different traits should be advantageous and thus selected for. Hence, phenotypic plasticity can evolve if Darwinian fitness is increased by changing phenotype.

What type of traits are phenotype?

Phenotype refers to an individual’s observable traits, such as height, eye color and blood type. A person’s phenotype is determined by both their genomic makeup (genotype) and environmental factors.

Why do phenotypically plastic responses depend on reliable environmental cues?

Phenotypic plasticity in defensive traits enables prey organisms to express a particular defense only if a reliable cue for a future attack is present. Thereby, the organisms can minimize costs affiliated with the formation or maintenance of a defense when predation risk is low.

Do humans have phenotypic plasticity?

Humans have been reported to exhibit phenotypic plasticity in sperm allocation depending on variation in socio-sexual situations.

What is an example of phenotypic plasticity in humans?

From a human health perspective, documented examples of plasticity most commonly include the results of exercise, training, and/or dieting on human morphology and physiology.

What are the 3 types of phenotypes?

Polygenic inheritance can be explained by additive effects of many loci: if each “capital” allele contributes one increment to the phenotype. With one locus and additive effects we have three phenotypic classes: AA, Aa and aa.

What is my phenotype?

Phenotype Definition Phenotype is a description of your physical characteristics. It includes both your visible traits (like hair or eye color) and your measurable traits (like height or weight). Phenotype also refers to characteristics related to your development and behavior, like elements of your personality.

Why phenotypic plasticity is important?

Many organisms have the ability to express different phenotypes in response to environmental conditions. Such phenotypic plasticity allows individual organisms to develop appropriate morphological, physiological, or behavioral traits that better fit a particular environment that they encounter.

Does phenotypic plasticity prevent rapid adaptation?

But plasticity can also retard adaptation by shifting the distribution of phenotypes in the population closer to the optimum, thus shielding genes from natural selection [5]. In addition, plasticity can be maladaptive, meaning that it does not always facilitate selection for adaptive genotypes [6,7].

Do humans have polyphenism?

We briefly review the best characterized models across taxa and highlight the consistent themes both in their epidemiology and what little we know about molecular mechanisms. Finally, we highlight work that supports the possibility that humans may have a subtle polyphenism at the level of metabolism.

What is human Polymorphism?

Polymorphism, as related to genomics, refers to the presence of two or more variant forms of a specific DNA sequence that can occur among different individuals or populations. The most common type of polymorphism involves variation at a single nucleotide (also called a single-nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP).