What is an evolutionary capacitor?Many mutations are conditionally neutral: important under some conditions, invisible at other times.Capacitors are on/off switches affecting the visibility of a particular set of conditionally neutral variants.While in the neutral state, 'cryptic' genetic variants can drift to high frequency; extending the electrical analogy, accumulated cryptic variants can be seen as a kind of genetic 'charge' [1]. Can you give an example of what cryptic variants are and what turns their phenotypic effects on?
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Joanna Masel (2013) studied this question.
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