3 ms·
I broadly agree with your point but careful when saying “no obvious phenotype”. As my former boss likes to say about work in C. elegans: “Worms can’t talk. They
by klmr 7y ago
I broadly agree with your point but careful when saying “no obvious phenotype”. As my former boss likes to say about work in C. elegans: “Worms can’t talk. They seem healthy but maybe they’re extremely unhappy.” Less flippantly, we know that biological systems in general have huge plasticity to buffer environmental changes. The environment is controlled under lab conditions, so loss of robustness due to genetic changes will almost never be detected. We have no good estimate — not even a ballpark! — of how many of these 95 “no obvious phenotype” cases actually have no phenotype, and beliefs widely vary.
- tleonardi 7y agoI couldn't agree more. Many knock-out mice for protein coding genes don't have an "obvious phenotype", but they are conserved across species. When studied in detail they often reveal an effect, be it in the response to environmental stress or subtle behavioural alterations. I can't find an updated reference, but results published in 2012 by the Mouse Genetics Project and the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium indicate that ~20% of coding gene knock-out lines examined don't have an "obvious phenotype" [1]. The most likely explanation for their conservation is that they do have a function and a phenotype: we just don't know what to look for. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463797/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463797/