a Related Biological Terms

Two muscles or muscle groups that flank a bone and move it in opposite directions.

The antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis was first proposed by George C. Williams in 1957 as an evolutionary explanation for senescence. Pleiotropy is the phenomenon where one gene controls for more than one phenotypic trait in an organism. Antagonistic Pleiotropy is today the best-accepted theory for the evolutionary origin of aging. The widespread occurrence of antagonistic pleiotropy suggests that any mutations that confer a manipulative ability to a virus in one host have the potential to confer maladaptive effects in a second host, with such effects potentially depending on the phylogenetic distance between host species. Antagonistic Pleiotropy can also be regarded as the theory that natural selection has favored genes conferring short-term benefits to the organism at the cost of deterioration in later life. Antagonistic pleiotropy arises when alleles that have beneficial effects on one set of fitness components also have deleterious effects on other fitness components.

Head end of bilateral animals where Sensory Organs are often located.

gray matter in the spinal cord that contains motor nerve cell bodies.Also known as: ventral horn

Pollen-producing oval body at the tip of a stamen.

In algae, structures that contain sperm. In plants, multicellular male structures where gametes form.

the action of opening a flower or period of time during which a flower is open.

Pigment produced in senescent plant Cells.

Anthropometry (from Greek ἄνθρωπος anthropos, 'human', and μέτρον metron, 'measure') refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial and psychological traits. Anthropometry refers to a branch of anthropology (the science of studying humans in all their relations), that deals with making comparative measurements of the human body. Anthropometry is the technical name for this preoccupation. It is the measurement of the body’s physical features, and these measures can play a key role as variables in epidemiology, psychology, and anthropology studies.

against, opposite