Talk:Antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 January 2020 and 8 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): 291653ABC, Malaika1089.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Images, Charts and Graphs

I propose some more visual additions to this article. Currently, it is all text.

Issue with rodent example

Currently, the first example of antagonistic pleiotropy is "An example of this would be female rodents that live in a nest with other females and may end up feeding young that are not theirs due to their intense parental drive. This strong parental drive will be selected for, but the organisms will still make the mistake of feeding young that are not theirs and misallocating their resources."

This mistakenly frames selection as operating primarily on the level of the individual, rather than at the level of the gene. The suite of "parental drive" genes that drive the rat to feed the offspring of other rats is not driving a misallocation of resources if the other offspring also contain the parental drive genes. Parental drive genes coexist with another suite of genes that might be "offspring privileging genes," allowing the rat to identify and protect her own offspring at the expense of those of other rats. But this is tangential.

Given that antagonistic pleiotropy arose in the context of explanations for aging/senescence, it seems best if this example were replaced with one relevant to aging. AllAmericanBreakfast (talk) 04:04, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Proposal to delete sub-section on 'Role in DNA repair'

The new section on Role in DNA repair does not appear to be relevant for the topic of this article, despite its assurances to the contrary. This section states: "In humans DNA repair capability declines in older individuals. These findings suggest that DNA repair activity is regulated at a level that facilitates vigorous function during youth, but at an insufficient level during maturity that results in aging. Thus proteins that regulate the level of DNA repair activity appear to have the antagonistic pleiotrophic effect of being beneficial during youthful development, but insufficient to prevent aging during maturity."

The fact that the repair activity declines in older individuals is not sufficient to categorise this phenomenon as antagonistic pleiotropy (indeed, declines of biological functions with age must be quite common). To be a pleiotropy, the phenomenon must: 1) operate through a gene that has more than one function; and 2) at least one of these functions results in increased fitness and another in decreased fitness.

The source cited in footnote 25 does not mention pleiotropy anywhere. The source in footnote 24 does not mention it in the Abstract (I was unable to access the full article).

Unless, within one week, someone is able to provide sources that document a pleiotropic phenomenon in DNA repair, I am going to delete this section. Dr Dobeaucoup (talk) 14:31, 31 August 2024 (UTC)