The alternative view is that CR and aging are in fact disparate phenomena, with CR having many favorable phenotypic effects (e.g., decreased adipose tissue, improved insulin sensitivity, increased survivorship), but not having effects broad enough to be characterized in terms of the actual process of "aging".
Nonetheless, because CFC syndrome has a progressive phenotype, and many of the phenotypic effects develop post-natally, patients may still be helped by systemic therapies after birth (1).
Many of these phenotypic effects involve extensive changes in gene expression.
Although many studies investigated phenotypic effects in relation to down regulation of lignin genes for maize and other species [ 30- 36], intragenic variability of OMT genes involved in lignin synthesis have not been studied to the same extent.
The fact that many manipulations did have phenotypic effects suggests that RNAi has worked but this is of course no proof.
Therefore, although some of the genes identified here may respond to lack of adjacent muscle tissue, many must underlie the phenotypic effects seen in response to lack of mechanical stimulation.
Both simulated and real data suggest that complementary epistasis contributes greatly to quantitative trait variation, and obscures the phenotypic effects of many 'downstream' loci in pathways.
In the present study, we discovered multiple QTL in the three-spined stickleback, some of which had large phenotypic effects, and many more had moderate-to-small effects.
Furthermore, the phenotypic effects of many of the major patterning genes are often quite similar between the two species [ 5, 16, 17].
There is abundant literature postulating that phenotypic effects of many mutations are dampened when the environment is benign and amplified when it is stressful (de Visser et al. 2003).
