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posted 24. April 2006 06:26
Source: Science Daily
Fruitfly Study Shows How Evolution Wings It
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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. Carroll and his Wisconsin colleagues collaborated with researchers from the University of Cambridge and Stony Brook University on the studies, which were published in the April 20. 2006, issue of the journal Nature.
"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."
Read full article at Science Daily
Original Research at Howard Hughes Medical Institute
[Emphases added by ISCID News Editor]
[Link-underlined terms with ^ (as added by ISCID News Editor) indicate linked entry in ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy]
[ 24. April 2006, 06:34: Message edited by: ISCID News Editor ]
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