These large-scale genetic changes may allow the organisms to adapt rapidly to new/changing environments.
Large-scale genetic changes can arise spontaneously and have been observed in natural populations of many organisms.
Large-scale genetic changes induced by polyploidy are thought to influence the transcriptome, metabolome and proteome, which can concomitantly alter the phenotype and ecology of the individuals.
Large-scale genetic changes caused by parental genome imbalance will influence the inheritance of genetic markers, which will in turn influence the transcriptome, proteome and metabolome.
Hence, asbestos may be selecting for pathway inactivation via large-scale genetic changes.
These data also indicate that dramatic shifts in centromere position normally originate from accumulated or large-scale genetic changes rather than from epigenetic positional drift.
This is consistent with functional loss of the cell cycle checkpoint activity of TP53 protein, which is then permissive for widespread, large-scale genetic changes.
Also contributing to non-additive FISH signal data may be the high frequency of switchgrass aneuploids, particularly among octoploid cytotypes [ 18, 40], which can lead to large-scale genetic changes and parental genome imbalance.
These variants range from single nucleotide mutations in the DNA of the cells to large-scale genetic changes such as loss of heterozygosity (where one of the two copies of a chromosomal region is lost) and aneuploidies (where the cell contains either more or fewer chromosomes than normal).
These changes could even have interaction with large scale genetic domains important in cancer [ 26].
Given that large scale genetic mutations do not occur over two or three generations, this increase in incidence can hardly be attributed to changes in genetic complexity [ 2, 3].
