PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nathan W Burke
AU  - Shinichi Nakagawa
AU  - Russell Bonduriansky
TI  - Sexual conflict explains diverse patterns of transgenerational plasticity
AID  - 10.1101/846287
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 846287
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/20/846287.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/20/846287.full
AB  - Transgenerational plasticity (TGP) occurs when the environment experienced by parents induces changes in offspring traits1. Such effects can be adaptive or non-adaptive2,3 and are increasingly recognised as key determinants of health4, cognition5, development6 and performance7–9 across a wide range of taxa, including humans. While the conditions that favour maternal TGP are well understood10,11, rapidly accumulating evidence indicates that TGP can be maternal or paternal 12–15, and offspring responses can be sex-specific12–18. However, the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this diversity are unknown. Here we use individual-based models to show that diverse patterns of TGP can evolve when the sexes experience different environments. We find that non-adaptive patterns of TGP result when alleles at loci that determine offspring responses to environmental information originating from the mother and father are subject to sexually antagonistic selection. By contrast, a variety of sex-specific responses evolve via duplication and sex-limitation of loci responsive to parental information, including non-adaptive TGP when sexual selection is strong. Sexual conflict can therefore explain why adaptive TGP evolves in some species but not others, why sons and daughters respond to parental signals in different ways, and why complex patterns of sex-specific TGP may often be non-adaptive.