Biologists have grown a fly with genes from dinosaur times. Free Technical Library News

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Biologists have grown a fly with dinosaur genes

14.10.2018

Scientists using genetic engineering have received a line of fruit flies in the genome of which there are no mutations that arose about 140 million years ago. These modifications significantly affected the development of the animal body, and by abolishing them, the authors were able to understand what ancient mutations caused important evolutionary changes in the embryonic development of organisms.

Scientists have long tried to understand how mutations in genes change the embryonic development of organisms, thanks to which life forms on Earth have become so diverse. However, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint key mutations, since they originated in the distant past, in long-extinct animals, and their traces in the genome have since been hidden by subsequent mutations.

"By introducing individual mutations that occurred in the deep past in ancient genes, we were able to show exactly how each of them influenced the development of organisms millions of years ago," says lead author Steven Small from New York University (USA). that the main cause of fundamental changes in the development of the animal, which became indispensable for all their descendants, were just two random mutations.

As part of this work, biologists studied the Bicoid gene, which controls the formation of the head in the embryo of flies. Organisms with a non-working gene variant die early, as their abdomen begins to form at both ends of the body. However, Bicoid is not found in other insects or more distant relatives of the fly, showing how even fundamental aspects of development can change drastically during evolution.

Scientists removed the Bicoid gene from modern flies and inserted a reconstructed ancestor into them. Such animals also began to die quickly. Then the biologists started adding mutations one at a time that happened in this gene millions of years ago. Most of them had little or no effect, but two worked together to turn the gene on, resulting in a distorted but recognizable head in the right place in the embryos.

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