Sexual conflict and gene expression: Exploring sex-specific associations between fitness and transcriptional variation.

Abstract

In recent years, the field of evolutionary biology received a fresh impulse from the increased technical and logistical availability and cost-effectiveness of genomics techniques. In particular, we have for the first time the opportunity to effectively explore and understand the genetic basis of traits variation in laboratory (and ultimately wild) populations. Traits that are most relevant in evolutionary and ecological contexts (e.g. morphological, life-history and behavioural traits) typically show a complex genetic architecture, being affected by many loci with small effect. Such loci often interact with one another over the same trait (epistasis), affect several traits simultaneously (pleiotropy), and/or depend in their effects on the "environmental condition" in which they are expressed (genotype by environment interactions). Modern genomics offers tools, such as microarrays and high-throughput sequencing, to gather an unprecedented amount of data on gene expression and sequence variation, and can be used in the attempt to construct a genotype-phenotype map, linking genes (or gene networks), and the variation in their sequence and expression, with the natural variation of phenotypic characters.