UVA Biology graduate students Tyler Wittman (lead author) and Chris Robinson, plus coauthors Joel McGlothlin (Virginia Tech) and Bob Cox, have a new paper in Evolution Letters in which they provide the first empirical demonstration that hormones shape patterns of genetic variance and covariance. The figure above shows that genetic correlations between males and females are naturally low for many aspects of size and ornamentation (red symbols), but these same genetic correlations increase significantly when females develop under experimentally elevated testosterone levels (purple symbols).
Wittman, TN, CD Robinson, JW McGlothlin, and RM Cox. 2021. Hormonal pleiotropy structures genetic covariance. Evolution Letters. https://doi.org/10.1002/evl3.240