Meeting Abstract

100.5  Thursday, Jan. 7  Mapping the Epigenetic Landscape: Rediscovering Waddington in the Post-Genomic Age JAMNICZKY, H.A.*; BOUGHNER, J.C.; GONZALEZ, P.N.; PARSONS, T.E.; POWELL, C.D.; ROLIAN, C.; SCHMIDT, E.J.; BOOKSTEIN, F.L.; HALLGRIMSSON, B.; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. Nacional de La Plata, Argentina; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. of Calgary, Canada; Univ. of Vienna, Austria and Univ. of Washington, USA; Univ. of Calgary, Canada hajamnic@ucalgary.ca

C.H. Waddington originally defined epigenetics as the causal analysis of development. This term has since come to connote the study of a variety of mechanisms and phenomena. We argue that Waddington’s original construal of the term was intended to describe the full variety of emergent developmental phenomena above the level of the genome, not only those involving chromatin modification. Such epigenetic mechanisms often result in bias in the direction of generated organismal variation, or in modulation of the amount of such variation. Emergent developmental phenomena generated by epigenetic mechanisms include modularity and canalization, among others, and form a key part of the bridge between genotype and phenotype. These emergent phenomena are of particular interest in the study of the means by which different phenotypes arise. We therefore extend Waddington’s epigenetic landscape metaphor, which continues to provide useful explanatory power in the post-genomic age, to explore the generation of selectable variation at the organismal level. The study of epigenetics, as construed here, is a central disciplinary focus of evolutionary developmental biology.