Tales of the Fly - 3
In the frantic world of fruitfly courtship, the difference between attracting a mate and going home alone may depend on having the right wing spots. Now, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have learned which elements of fly DNA make these spots come and go in different species. The experiments are among the first to root out “the deep mechanics of evolution” that underpin complex traits, according to the study’s senior author Sean Carroll, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The researchers said their findings emphasize the evolutionary significance of “pleiotropic” genes - those with multiple on-switches that enable the expression of a single gene in different tissues or at different stages of development.
“The wing spot on the fruitfly is a particularly good model because we know it constitutes a new feature that is gained or lost by evolution in different species,” said Carroll. “And, since it is a spatial pattern, it gives us a chance to analyze the evolution of a physical trait. Such traits have size, shape, and length, and they are more complicated than physiological traits. For example, eye color is not a tricky thing to figure out, since it can be reduced to single genetic changes. But evolutionary biologists want to understand how even complicated bits of anatomy and machinery - like the wing or the complex eye - are put together in the course of evolution.”
Wing spots have evolved in different fruitfly species as part of the courtship displays that males present to females during mating. Thus, they can be under intense evolutionary pressure to appear and be maintained, depending on whether the females find them “attractive,” Carroll noted.
This article is quite general; PZ Myers goes into more depth.
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