Understanding the consequences of genotype for phenotype (which ranges from molecule-
level effects to whole-organism traits) is at the core of genetic diagnostics in medicine. Many …

The concept of evolvability emerged in the early 1990s and soon became fashionable as a
label for different streams of research in evolutionary biology. In evolutionary quantitative …

A key goal of biology is to understand phenotypic characteristics, such as health, disease
and evolutionary fitness. Phenotypic variation is produced through a complex web of …

Living things are unimaginably complex, yet they have withstood a withering assault of
harmful influences over several billion years. These influences include cataclysmic changes …

Interactions among loci or between genes and environmental factors make a substantial
contribution to variation in complex traits such as disease susceptibility. Nonetheless, many …

Robustness is the invariance of phenotypes in the face of perturbation. The robustness of
phenotypes appears at various levels of biological organization, including gene expression …

Inbreeding depression, the reduction in fitness that accompanies inbreeding, is one of the
most important topics of research in evolutionary and conservation genetics. In the recent …

Genetic architecture, the structure of the mapping from genotype to phenotype, determines
the variational properties of the phenotype and is instrumental in understanding its …

Background Most, if not all, organisms possess the ability to alter their phenotype in direct
response to changes in their environment, a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity …

A key question in human genetics and evolutionary biology is how mutations in different
genes combine to alter phenotypes. Efforts to systematically map genetic interactions have …