Question

Explain how the maternal effect effects development and how you test that?

Answer 1

Maternal effect is the influence of the maternal gene expression on their offspring which causes a phenotypic variation in them. Due to this effect some of the gene that are not expressed in the mother trait can affect the offspring development and function. This effect occurs due to the indirect impact of mother genes to offspring . Despite affecting their development scientists have found that these effect have a major impact on evolutionary process of an organism. They causes a various change in organism such as adaptive evolution, dynamics of population size and niche construction. Maternal effect can be determined by asymmetrical pattern of resemblance of relatives in crossing scheme , experimental cross -fostering and genomic imprinting. However all this technique have their own disadvantages because a maternal and offspring gene are blended and this causes partial expression of maternal gene which is difficult to differentiate them.