genes confer similar robustness to environmental, stochastic, and genetic perturbations in yeast基因赋予类似的健壮性环境、随机和遗传扰动酵母.pdfVIP

Genes Confer Similar Robustness to Environmental, Stochastic, and Genetic Perturbations in Yeast Ben Lehner1,2* ´ 1 European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Barcelona, Spain, 2 Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avanc¸ats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Abstract Gene inactivation often has little or no apparent consequence for the phenotype of an organism. This property—enetic (or mutational) robustness—is pervasive, and has important implications for disease and evolution, but is not well understood. Dating back to at least Waddington, it has been suggested that mutational robustness may be related to the requirement to withstand environmental or stochastic perturbations. Here I show that global quantitative data from yeast are largely consistent with this idea. Considering the effects of mutations in all nonessential genes shows that genes that confer robustness to environmental or stochastic change also buffer the effects of genetic change, and with similar efficacy. This means that selection during evolution for environmental or stochastic robustness (also referred to as canalization) may frequently have the side effect of increasing genetic robustness. A dynamic environment may therefore promote the evolution of phenotypic complexity. It also means that ‘‘hub’’ genes in genetic interaction (synthetic lethal) networks are generally genes that confer environmental resilience and phenotypic stability. Citation: Lehner B (2010) Genes Confer Similar Robustness to Environmental, Stochastic, and Genetic Perturbations in Yeast. PLoS ONE 5(2): e9035. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0009035 Editor: Michael Polymenis, Texas AM University, United States of America Received November 15, 2009; Accepted January 15, 2010; Published February