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Isolating And Quantifying The Role Of Developmental Noise In Generating Phenotypic Variation, Maria Kiskowski, Tilmann Glimm, Nickolas Moreno, Tony Gamble, Ylenia Chiari

Mathematics Faculty Publications

Genotypic variation, environmental variation, and their interaction may produce variation in the developmental process and cause phenotypic differences among individuals. Developmental noise, which arises during development from stochasticity in cellular and molecular processes when genotype and environment are fixed, also contributes to phenotypic variation. While evolutionary biology has long focused on teasing apart the relative contribution of genes and environment to phenotypic variation, our understanding of the role of developmental noise has lagged due to technical difficulties in directly measuring the contribution of developmental noise. The influence of developmental noise is likely underestimated in studies of phenotypic variation due to …