Unit for Theoretical Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology
University of Vienna

Abstract

Mechanisms that canalize or compensate perturbations of organismal development (targeted or compensatory growth) are widely considered a prerequisite of individual health and the evolution of complex life, but little is known about the nature of these mechanisms. It is even unclear if and how a “target trajectory” of individual development is encoded in the organism’s genetic-developmental system or, instead, emerges as an epiphenomenon. I present a statistical model of developmental canalization based on an extended autoregressive model. I show that under certain assumptions the strength of canalization and the amount of canalized variance in a population can be estimated, or at least approximated, from longitudinal phenotypic measurements, even if the target trajectories are unobserved. I extend this model to multivariate measures and discuss reifications of the ensuing parameter matrix. I present an application of these approaches to human postnatal craniofacial growth. My presentation is based on a paper published together with Katya Stansfield (https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008381) but I like to discuss a number of "open ends" of this research and potential collaborations.