Dominance—One Hundred and Fifteen years after Mendelʹs paper

InThe Molecular Basis of Dominance, Kacser & Burns (1981) demonstrated that dominance in diploids and polyploids, and pleiotropy in all organisms, were biochemical phenomena; they were the consequences of the response of a metabolic system to a genetically specified change in the activity of any one enzyme within the system. Epistasis was similarly explicable when each of at least two enzyme activities suffered a change. The significance of this achievement by Kacser & Burns (1981) for biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, medicine and bio-technology is best seen against the background of 115 years of attempts to explain the origins of dominance.