Pangenome to molecular genetics question. If every plant genotype has 100s to 1000s of genes with natural LOF variants, is there any reason to think CRISPR mutants in those same genes will be unnatural or artifactual?
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I'm getting a rising level of pushback on LOF alleles being at adaptive. Unsure of why or where from.
There is a ton of interesting work on long term vs short term adaptability/extinction risk that could be done if Eco, Evo and MolBio could admit that LOF are real, not redundant and not all bad.
It's as if the community has forgotten all the work on balanced LOF alleles like RPM1 from the last century. The alternative is that the mindset considers them oddballs with no generalization or applicability and pangenomic variation is simply genomic noise. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10458161/
I think it falls also under the general lack of awareness that adaptive evolution through LOF is incredibly common, especially given background rates of gene duplications, or re-diploidization after WGD, or even the evolution of gene regulation (eg loss of TFBS, miRNA bonding sites).
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There is a ton of interesting work on long term vs short term adaptability/extinction risk that could be done if Eco, Evo and MolBio could admit that LOF are real, not redundant and not all bad.