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Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on September 1, 2006.
Genetics, Vol. 174, 931-935, October 2006, Copyright © 2006
doi:10.1534/genetics.106.060475
A Chip off the Old Block: A Model for the Evolution of Genomic Imprinting via Selection for Parental Similarity
Hamish G. Spencer*,1 and
Andrew G. Clark
* Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Department of Zoology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand and Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
1 Corresponding author: Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Department of Zoology, University of Otago, 340 Great King St., P.O. Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.
E-mail: h.spencer{at}otago.ac.nz
A consequence of genomic imprinting is that offspring are more similar to one parent than to the other, depending on which parent's genes are inactivated in those offspring. We hypothesize that genomic imprinting may have evolved at some loci because of selection to be similar to the parent of one sex or the other. We construct and analyze an evolutionary-genetic model of a two-locus two-deme system, in which one locus codes for a character under local selection and the second locus is a potential cis-acting modifier of imprinting. A proportion of males only migrate between demes every generation, and prebreeding males are less fit, on average, than females. We examine the conditions in which an imprinting modifier allele can invade a population fixed for a nonimprinting modifier allele and vice versa. We find that the conditions under which the imprinting modifier invades are biologically restrictive (high migration rates and high values of recombination between the two loci) and thus this hypothesis is unlikely to explain the evolution of imprinting. Our modeling also shows that, as with several other hypotheses, polymorphism of imprinting status may evolve under certain circumstances, a feature not predicted by verbal accounts.
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