Retention of immense genetic diversity is not only significant in terms of evolutionary potential to withstand diverse selection regimes, but also has important implications in rice breeding to furnish new genes for crop improvement, e.g. abiotic stress tolerance, or pest- or disease-resistance genes (Frankel and Soule 1981).
Our findings highlight the potential for significant evolutionary divergence in gene network function, even when the constituent parts of such networks are well conserved.
Significant differences were observed in the evolutionary potential in respect to number of beneficial positions and extend of improvements were found among DMSO, DOx and TFE.
Furthermore, conservation biologists recognize the importance of conserving "evolutionary potential" and evolutionarily significant units [74], [76]: thus, conservation planning requires data about species in a phylogenetic and phylogeographic context to make more informed decisions about species conservation.
We also expand on past population genetic studies in WCR and show that this species has significant genetic diversity, little population structure, and a high evolutionary potential to resist control strategies.
But under semi-natural conditions, despite significant genetic differences among families (see Table 1), the expected evolutionary potential is reduced due to the low genetic control of the trait (h 2 of 0.041).
For example, evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) were first described to include sufficient genetic diversity to retain evolutionary potential, and thus address long-term conservation issues as well as historical population trends [5], [6].
In the long term, these should serve to preserve the evolutionary potential of mangroves via the identification and subsequent conservation of evolutionary significant units (ESUs).
Conservation planning based on evolutionary significant units (ESU) has received increasing attention over the last two decades, owing largely to its application under the US Endangered Species Act; there is significant controversy, however, over the relative importance that should be given to genetic distinctiveness versus evolutionary potential (see, e.g. Crandall et al. 2000 and Moritz 2002).
A statistically significant evolutionary rate correlation between co-expressed and genes remains even after we additionally control for two further potential confounding factors, protein length and gene essentiality, even if co-expression explains only about 2% of the variation in evolutionary rate; a similar result is seen for genes with synthetic lethal interactions (Table 2).
Fortunately, dental remains reflect significant evolutionary changes.
