Plasticity and environment-specific relationships between gene expression and fitness in Saccharomyces cerevisiae .

Environments can affect the phenotypic traits an organism produces as well as the adaptive value of these traits (i.e. whether those traits will allow the organism to better survive and pass their genes on to the next generation). This study shows how the environment impacts both the production and selection of traits using the expression of a metabolic gene in the baker's yeast as a model system. This study further shows that some types of genetic changes make gene expression traits more responsive to environmental changes than others, suggesting that genetic changes affecting different molecular mechanisms of gene regulation may contribute differently to genetic evolution.