Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Hybridization Produces Novelty When The Mapping Of Form To Function Is Many To One, Nicholas F. Parnell, C Darrin Hulsey, J. Todd Streelman

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- General Biology

Background

Evolutionary biologists want to explain the origin of novel features and functions. Two recent but separate lines of research address this question. The first describes one possible outcome of hybridization, called transgressive segregation, where hybrid offspring exhibit trait distributions outside of the parental range. The second considers the explicit mapping of form to function and illustrates manifold paths to similar function (called many to one mapping, MTOM) when the relationship between the two is complex. Under this scenario, functional novelty may be a product of the number of ways to elicit a functional outcome (i.e., the degree of MTOM). …