This recent paper discusses the affirmation made by evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biologists, that adaptive mutations leading to morphological changes are more likely to occur in cis- regulatory sequences rather than in protein- coding regions.
But are this claims supportable? [...] We will conclude that evo devo's enthusiasm for cis- regulatory changes is unfounded and premature. There is no evidence at present that cis- regulatory changes play a major role -much less a pre-eminent one- in adaptive evolution.Despite their comprehensive explanation, they did not mention the now well documented impact of the epigenetic regulation of cis- acting elements on adaptive evolution, as we however have read about it here before in some papers, and overall in the book by Jablonka and Lamb (2005)
Hoekstra HE. and Coyne JA. 2007. Evolution 61(5):995-1016
epigeneticsMore comments can be found at the Faculty of 1000 website.
