Our CCI data in Gli1-CreER T2 mice differ from these prior studies in that heritable labeling for Shh pathway activation was reduced in the cortical lesion area at 2 weeks postinjury, and this was maintained through 6 weeks.
Stem cells of all types are characterized by stable, heritable states, allowing for multiple developmental pathways.
Given the enrichment of these pathways among the most heritable metabolites, our results offer hope that these pathways might help to explain variation in important fitness traits, including survival, in natural populations.
To tag a relevant part of the pathway from genetic variation to psychiatric disorder, the endophenotypes must be heritable traits and their heritability must arise partly from the genetic variants that also influence the psychiatric disorder [ 17].
Therefore, if the genetic signals underlying gF and gC, two highly heritable and polygenic traits, cluster in known biological pathways, it should be possible to use pathway-based analyses to identify which biological processes are most strongly implicated in these subcomponents of g.
Indeed, genes converge on molecular co-expression pathways, which may be associated with heritable characteristics of patients and their siblings, called intermediate phenotypes, such as prefrontal anomalies and thalamic dysconnectivity during attentional control [2].
We then applied GSEA to improve the definition of pathways that may be influenced by heritable traits and identified 77 gene sets with FDR<0.05 (Table S1).
Whether the antagonistic RNAi pathways play a role in this heritable process, perhaps through imbalances in production of self-RNAs versus piRNAs, is an open question.
Gene expression traits that were best able to discriminate the fasted and fed states were more heritable and achieved greater coherence with respect to pathways associated with metabolic traits.
Cassandra Extavour, an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and grad student Delbert André Green II were able to show that a single molecular pathway plays a role in both heritable changes in the flies' number of ovarioles — egg-producing compartments in the ovaries — and in how they react to their environments by shutting down some ovarioles.
