An organism's phenotype is influenced by its genes, environment, and stochastic developmental occurrences. Despite being acknowledged as a fundamental biological concept that affects life history, illness susceptibility, and possibly evolution, developmental variation (DV) has received less attention since there isn't an appropriate model organism.
The recently discovered, hardy, and incredibly fertile parthenogenetic marbled crayfish might be used as an experimental animal to get around this problem. Even when raised under the same conditions, batch-mates of this clonal crayfish, which were revealed to be isogenic by study of nuclear microsatellite loci, showed unusually vast ranges of diversity in colour, size, life-span, reproduction, behavior, and number of sense organs.The marmorated colour showed the highest degree of variety, with each of the several hundred animals analyzed having a distinct pattern. Both global DNA methylation, an overall molecular marker of an animal's epigenetic state, and fluctuating asymmetry, a classic sign of the epigenetic component of the phenotypic, were shown to vary across identically reared batch-mates. All phases of life showed developmental diversity, which was likely caused by patterning mechanisms like reaction-diffusion in the early stages and non-linear, self-reinforcing circuitries involving behavior and metabolism in the later stages. According to our research, even if clone-mates are nurtured in the same environment, unique genotypes can map to a variety of phenotypes via DV, leading to individuality in parthenogenetic species and heterogeneity among clone-mates.Our findings also demonstrate that DV, an ostensibly widespread phenomena in animals and plants, may bring unpredictability into life histories, changing population dynamics and individual fitness. We examine potential applications of DV in evolutionary biology.
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