Evolution of mir-92a Underlies Natural Morphological Variation in Drosophila melanogaster

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.018
• Publication Date: 2013-02-28T16:18:15Z
• Authors: Saad Arif; Sophie Murat; Isabel Almudi; Maria D.S. Nunes; Diane Bortolamiol...; Naomi S. McGregor; James M.S. Currie; Harri Hughes; Matthew Ronshaugen; Élio Sucena; Eric C. Lai; Christian Schlött...; Alistair P. McGregor
• Keywords: Variation (astronomy)

Identifying the genetic mechanisms underlying phenotypic change is essential to understanding how gene regulatory networks and ultimately genotype-to-phenotype map evolve. It recognized that microRNAs (miRNAs) have potential facilitate evolutionary [1Li J. Zhang Z. miRNA variation in human evolution.Trends Genet. 2013; 29: 116-124Abstract Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (33) Google Scholar, 2Niwa R. Slack F.J. The evolution of animal microRNA function.Curr. Opin. Dev. 2007; 17: 145-150Crossref (169) 3Ronshaugen M. Biemar F. Piel Levine Lai E.C. Drosophila iab-4 causes a dominant homeotic transformation halteres wings.Genes 2005; 19: 2947-2952Crossref (136) Scholar]; however, there are no known examples natural morphological caused by changes expression. Therefore, contribution miRNAs remains unknown 4Alonso C.R. Wilkins A.S. molecular elements underlie developmental evolution.Nat. Rev. 6: 709-715Crossref (66) Scholar]. melanogaster subgroup species display portion trichome-free cuticle on femur second leg called "naked valley." was previously shown Ultrabithorax (Ubx) involved naked valley between D. simulans [5Davis G.K. Srinivasan D.G. Wittkopp P.J. Stern D.L. function regulation legs melanogaster.Dev. Biol. 308: 621-631Crossref (15) 6Stern A role differences species.Nature. 1998; 396: 463-466Crossref (203) However, size also varies among populations melanogaster, ranging from 1,000 up 30,000 μm2. We investigated basis intraspecific found neither Ubx nor shavenbaby (svb) [7Sucena E. Delon I. Jones Payre Regulatory shavenbaby/ovo underlies multiple cases parallelism.Nature. 2003; 424: 935-938Crossref (180) 8Sucena Divergence larval morphology sechellia its sibling cis-regulatory ovo/shaven-baby.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2000; 97: 4530-4534Crossref (172) Scholar] contributes this difference. Instead, we show mir-92a expression through repression shavenoid (sha) [9Schertel C. Rutishauser T. Förstemann K. Basler Functional characterization novel vivo library.Genetics. 2012; 192: 1543-1552Crossref (35) our results reveal mechanism for suggest modulation potentially plays prominent generating organismal diversity.