• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Friday, June 20, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Biology

Scientists go ‘back to the future,’ create flies with ancient genes to study evolution

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
October 9, 2018
in Biology
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
ADVERTISEMENT
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram
IMAGE

Credit: Image courtesy of Rhea Datta.

Scientists at New York University and the University of Chicago have created fruit flies carrying reconstructed ancient genes to reveal how ancient mutations drove major evolutionary changes in embryonic development–the impact of which we see today.

The work, published in the journal eLife, found that two mutations that arose 140 million years ago changed the function of a critical developmental gene, which now regulates development of the head and other structures in virtually all species of present-day flies.

"By introducing individual mutations that happened in the deep past into the ancient genes, we were able to show precisely how each one affected development many millions of years ago," explains Stephen Small, an NYU biologist and one of the paper's senior authors.

"We found that just two chance mutations were the major causes of a profound change in the animal's developmental processes – a change that became indispensable in all of its present-day descendants," says Joseph Thornton, the paper's other senior author and professor of Ecology and Evolution and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago.

Scientists have long sought to understand how genetic mutations changed embryonic development to yield the diverse animal forms we see today. But identifying the important mutations is very difficult because they occurred in the deep past, in long-extinct animals, and they have usually been mixed up with scores of subsequent mutations.

The laboratories of NYU's Small and the University of Chicago's Thornton approached this problem in an innovative way: computationally inferring ancient gene sequences based on their modern descendants, chemically recreating the genes, and then putting them into fly embryos, thereby creating transgenic embryos–i.e., those inserted with a foreign gene–to follow their effects on development in the laboratory.

The study is the first to use ancestral reconstruction in the field of the evolution of development, or evo-devo.

The researchers focused on the evolution of a gene called bicoid. Bicoid triggers the formation of structures at the head (anterior) end of embryos in the fruit fly, an important model organism because many aspects of its genetics and development are shared with humans and other animals. Bicoid serves as the "master regulator" of anterior development by turning on expression of a set genes that carry out head development and suppress tail development, and doing so only at the anterior end.

Bicoid has long presented an evolutionary puzzle. Fly embryos lacking active Bcd protein die very early because instead of forming a head they form tail structures at both ends. But the bicoid gene does not even exist in other insects or more distantly related animals, which use other genes to control anterior development. Bicoid shows that even the most fundamental aspects of development can change drastically during evolution, but how that process occurs is unknown.

The Small and Thornton laboratories sought to understand how bicoid evolved its new developmental function through several means: recreating the precursor gene from which it evolved, characterizing its biochemical functions, introducing it into modern-day fruit flies whose own bicoid gene had been removed, studying its effects on the formation of head structures and expression of the specific genes that drive head development, and introducing historical mutations into the ancestral gene to determine their effects.

Their initial results showed that flies carrying the precursor gene fail to develop a head, with tails at both ends and none of the key genes involved in head development properly expressed. The group then introduced into the precursor gene every mutation that happened during the ancient interval during which bicoid evolved its new role.

Most of the changes had little or no effect on bicoid's functions, but two of them together allowed bicoid to activate a completely new set of target genes. When introduced into fly embryos, this evolutionary mutant version of bicoid activated most of the genes involved in head development in their proper places, and the embryos formed recognizable, albeit incomplete, head structures instead of tail structures at the anterior end.

The group concluded that these two mutations, when combined, were the predominant causes of bicoid's functional evolution, with additional mutations during the same ancient period fine-tuning the gene's new function.

"By combining the most advanced techniques from developmental biology and evolutionary genetics, we were able to dissect how molecular changes in an ancient gene fundamentally changed one of the most important – and otherwise conserved – processes in animal development," Small notes.

###

The study's co-first authors are Qinwen Liu, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Chicago, and Pinar Onal and Rhea Datta, both postdoctoral fellows at NYU at the time of the study (Datta is now an assistant professor at Hamilton College). Other authors include Julia Rogers and Martha Bulyk of Harvard University and Urs Schmidt-Ott of the University of Chicago.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01GM051946, R01GM10439, R01GM121931, R01-HG005287, F32GM112351) and from the National Science Foundation (IOS0744966, IOS1355057).

Media Contact

James Devitt
[email protected]
212-998-6808
@nyuniversity

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news.h

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34594

Share33Tweet21Share6ShareShareShare4

Related Posts

Researchers Suggest Placenta and Hormone Levels in the Womb Played Key Role in Human Evolution

Researchers Suggest Placenta and Hormone Levels in the Womb Played Key Role in Human Evolution

June 20, 2025
Representation of single-cell RNA sequencing data from two species of worms

See-Through Worms Illuminate Evolutionary Mysteries

June 19, 2025

Polar Ocean ‘Greening’ Signals Potential Shifts in Global Fisheries

June 19, 2025

Combined Effects of Bisphenol A and Retinoic Acid on Brain Development Revealed

June 19, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Green brake lights in the front could reduce accidents

    Study from TU Graz Reveals Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates

    161 shares
    Share 64 Tweet 40
  • New Study Uncovers Unexpected Side Effects of High-Dose Radiation Therapy

    76 shares
    Share 30 Tweet 19
  • Pancreatic Cancer Vaccines Eradicate Disease in Preclinical Studies

    71 shares
    Share 28 Tweet 18
  • How Scientists Unraveled the Mystery Behind the Gigantic Size of Extinct Ground Sloths—and What Led to Their Demise

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Organoid Model Reveals Residual Colorectal Cancer Stem Cells

Terahertz Spectroscopy Maps Buried PN Junction Depths

Revolutionizing Rehabilitation: Virtual Reality Offers New Hope for Stroke Survivors to Recover Movement

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.