Abstract
Neo-Darwinian explanations of organic evolution have settled on mutation as the principal factor in producing evolutionary novelty. Mechanistic characterizations have been also biased by the classic dogma of molecular biology, where only proteins regulate gene expression. This together with the rearrangement of genetic information, in terms of genes and chromosomes, was considered the cornerstone of evolution at the level of natural populations. This predominant view excluded both alternative explanations and phenomenologies that did not fit its paradigm. With the discovery of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) and their role in the control of genetic expression, new mechanisms arose providing heuristic power to complementary explanations to evolutionary processes overwhelmed by mainstream genocentric views. Viruses, epimutation, paramutation, splicing, and RNA editing have been revealed as paramount functions in genetic variations, phenotypic plasticity, and diversity. This article discusses how current epigenetic advances on ncRNAs have changed the vision of the mechanisms that generate variation, how organism-environment interaction can no longer be underestimated as a driver of organic evolution, and how it is now part of the transgenerational inheritance and evolution of species.
Highlights
In the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, mutations have been proposed as the principal factor behind the origin of new phenotypic variation and highlighted as the cornerstone of evolutionary process (Nei, 2013)
Genetic code was mainly associated with protein coding DNAs, which only make up ∼2% of the human genome; non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in Phenotypic Variation and Organic Evolution recently, novel functions have been assigned for non-coding DNA regions for proteins (Lunter et al, 2006; Dunham et al, 2012)
Small ncRNAs are influential in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance because they can act as guides to specific genomic location by sequencing homology and by recruiting various proteins to target sites, including epigenetic modifiers such as methyltransferases that are important in ADN methylation (Castel and Martienssen, 2013; Riddle, 2014)
Summary
In the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, mutations have been proposed as the principal factor behind the origin of new phenotypic variation and highlighted as the cornerstone of evolutionary process (Nei, 2013). The central dogma postulates an unidirectional flow of information from DNA, mediated by RNA, to proteins (Crick, 1958, 1970) This pervasive idea consolidated a deterministic and reductionist inheritance (Shapiro, 2009; Frías-Lasserre, 2012), impacting our understanding of all genetic mechanisms that effectively intervene on population genetics and organic evolution (Schreiber, 2005; Weber, 2006; Gillings and Westoby, 2014). We review and discuss how environmental stimuli and ncRNAs may play an important role in inheritance through the epigenome by triggering epigenetically heritable changes that may lead the origin of new species. In transgenerational inheritance caused by environmental stressors, ncRNAs may play an important role among the set of mechanisms that underlie changes in phenotypic variation and organic evolution
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