Functional synonymous variants in plants: an emerging perspective on hidden causal alleles in domestication and agronomic traits.

Abstract excerpt

BACKGROUND: Synonymous mutations have long been treated as neutral or silent variants and are therefore often filtered out or deprioritized in genetic analyses. Yet increasing evidence shows that, even without altering the protein sequence, they can influence gene function and phenotype through multiple RNA-level mechanisms. In plants, recent studies suggest that synonymous variants can act as causal alleles in...

Topics

• Domestication
• Alleles
• Crops, Agricultural
• Phenotype
• Genetic Variation
• Plant Breeding