supersport
Posts: 158
Joined: Aug. 2007
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turns out pigmentation of the fruit fly doesn't work at all:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolgen....a_1.php
"Sean Carroll is one of the leading researchers bridging the gap between evolutionary and developmental biology. His students' work on the evolution of Drosophila wing pigmentation (reviewed here and here by PZ Myers) revealed that changes in the cis-regulatory elements (CREs) flanking the yellow gene are partially responsible for the gain and loss of wing spots during evolution. The Carroll lab has not unraveled the entire story, but they have shown that changes in the expression of a gene (rather than its protein coding sequence) can lead to novel phenotypes. It would be interesting to find out why this trait is sexual dimorphic (only males have wing spots, so some sex-specific upstream transcription factors are probably involved in determining the phenotype) and what other genes are involved the pigmentation patterning (the transgenic D. melanogaster have dark pigmentation in the anterior-distal portion of their wing, but this pattern is not as crisp as in the species with endogenous pigmentation)."
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