The morphological traits of EMT were consistent with key differences between EP156T and EPT1 cells regarding E-cadherin and N-cadherin gene expression as shown in Figure 2B D and detailed below.
This is consistent with morphological traits: S. floridana resembles the Old World subgenus Salix s.l.l
The monophyly of subsections found in the nuclear tree is consistent with the morphological traits that led botanists to recognize these subsections for a century [ 47], meaning that here again, the nuclear but not the chloroplast phylogeny is more likely to reflect the species tree.
Thus, one might expect traits that have been subject to consistent and strong directional selection (e.g., life history traits) to have lower heritabilities than traits subject to weaker or less consistent selection (e.g., morphological traits).
Again, this pattern is consistent with our interpretation that morphological traits have largely additive differences.
Multiple comparison t-tests (Table 4) demonstrate that F1 phenotypes are intermediate to and significantly different from the parental crosses for all morphological traits measured (mass, SVL, and growth), which is consistent with the inference of an additive genetic basis for divergence of these traits.
Plants have consistently more exaggerated morphological traits than insects at high trait magnitudes and in some cases less exaggerated traits than insects at smaller trait magnitudes.
The tree topologies may become more stable, and consistent with plausible hypotheses of the evolution of morphological traits, as the mtDNA of additional taxa are added to the data set.
Nevertheless, the results also are consistent with the possibility that different genetic architectures may underlie expression of morphological traits in stickleback populations of different geographic origins.
For testing species discrimination using morphological traits, we chose additional independent characters based on their potential information content, scoring reliability and reproducibility, their consistent preservation in different conditions and ease of use.
