A Tomato Gene Weighs In

摘要

Look at any group of people and you will see that they differ from one another in a continuous or quantitative fashion. Short to tall or slender to stout, the variations are continuous. Such quantitative variation has been the raw material for both Darwinian evolution under natural selection and crop improvement under human selection (see the figure, this page). As such, quantitative variation has occupied the interest of geneticists for nearly a century. Yet, progress in understanding how genes control quantitative traits has been slow, and the field of quantitative genetics has been largely occupied with making statistical descriptions of the underlying genes, never really knowing what genes are involved.