Papers › Dominance reversals: The resolution of genetic conflict and maintenance of genetic variation
Dominance reversals: The resolution of genetic conflict and maintenance of genetic variation
Karl Grieshop, Eddie K. H. Ho, Katja R. Kasimatis
Beneficial reversals of dominance reduce the costs of genetic trade-offs and can enable selection to maintain genetic variation for fitness. Beneficial dominance reversals are characterized by the beneficial allele for a given context (e.g. habitat, developmental stage, trait, or sex) being dominant in that context but recessive where deleterious. This context-dependence at least partially mitigates the fitness consequence of heterozygotes carrying one non-beneficial allele for their context and can result in balancing selection that maintains alternative alleles. Dominance reversals are theoretically plausible and are supported by mounting empirical evidence. Here we highlight the importance of beneficial dominance reversals as a mechanism for the mitigation of genetic conflict and review the theory and empirical evidence for them. We identify some areas in need of further research and development and outline three methods (dominance ordination, allele-specific expression, and allele-specific ATAC-Seq) that could facilitate the identification of antagonistic genetic variation. There is ample scope for the development of new empirical methods as well as reanalysis of existing data through the lens of dominance reversals. A greater focus on this topic will expand our understanding of the mechanisms that resolve genetic conflict and whether they maintain genetic variation.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections