Heliconius numata (top) mimics the wing
pattern of Melinaea mneme (bottom).
What’s the News: A single species of butterfly in the Amazon is able to copy the wing patterns of several neighboring species to avoid being eaten by hungry birds—a wide-ranging talent that has long perplexed evolutionary biologists. Now, an international team of scientists studying the mimicking butterfly Heliconius numata has finally solved this puzzle that plagued even Charles Darwin.
Writing in the journal Nature, researchers found that a specific supergene—a cluster of genes that is passed on to offspring as one big chunk—controls the different elements of wing patterns, allowing related butterflies to display distinct markings despite having the same DNA. “These butterflies are the ‘transformers’ of the insect world,” lead researcher Mathieu Joron said in a prepared statement. “But instead of being able to turn from a car into a robot with the flick of switch, a single genetic switch allows these insects to morph into several different mimetic forms.”
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This week in bizarre new forms of mammal reproduction: mice who have genetic material from two fathers but nary a mother, the next step in a progression of scientific efforts to get more creative with sex and reproduction.
“It has been a weird project, but we wanted to see if it could be done” in mice, says Richard Behringer, lead author of the study and a developmental geneticist at M.D. Anderson in Houston. [Wall Street Journal]
Weird, and also complex: The process requires several generations and some creative genetic trickery. To make it happen, Behringer’s team started with a single male mouse. Let’s call him Fred. Scientists took cells from Fred and transformed them into a line of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can grow into any kind of cell in the body. Normally, of course, a male’s sex chromosomes are X and Y. But when the researchers created these stem cells, some of them—about 1 percent—lost the Y chromosome through ordinary mistakes that happen in cell division.
Thus, the scientists had a batch of Fred-derived stem cells that had no Y, and thus were labeled XO cells. The next step was to take ordinary mice blastocysts—early stage embryos that had been conceived in the traditional fashion—and inject the XO cells into them. When this XO-injected embryo was implanted into a normal female mouse, she gave birth to offspring called chimera—what we call animals with two or more genetically distinct populations of cells. In this case the mouse possessed, in addition to the normal cells from its mother and father, some XO cells derived from Fred.
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From Ed Yong:
The vast majority of people who are infected with HIV go on to develop AIDS. Their bodies become riddled with the virus, their immune systems falter, and they are besieged by life-threatening infections. But not everyone shares the same fate. Around 1 in every 300 people infected with HIV carry genetic trump cards that allow them to resist and control the virus. These “HIV controllers” can live with the virus for years. They never develop AIDS and they live long, healthy lives, even if they never take any medication. Their genetic secrets are slowly being revealed.
Researchers studying thousands of people with HIV, some with the controllers and some without, found something surprising:
Amazingly, every single one of these variants sits within a specific part of our sixth chromosome, among a set of genes called class I HLA genes. The proteins they produce form part of the internal security checks that defend us from infections. They grab small pieces of other proteins from inside our cells and display them on the outside, waving them under the noses of passing T-cells. If the T-cells recognise these pieces as parts of bacteria, viruses or other foreign invaders, they tell the infected cell to self-destruct and set the immune system on red alert.
Check out the rest of this post at DISCOVER blog Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Related Content:
80beats: HIV’s Primate Precursor Is Very Old. Why Did It Jump To Humans So Recently?
80beats: Good News: Anti-Microbial Gel Cuts HIV Infection Rates for Women
80beats: New HIV Hope? Researchers Find Natural Antibodies That Thwart the Virus
80beats: Gene Therapy Hope for HIV: Engineered Stem Cells Hold Promise
80beats: Did the Eradication of Smallpox Accidentally Help the Spread of HIV?
Image: Wikimedia / HIV Budding
A tiny fraction of vertebrate species have ever been seen reproducing through parthenogenesis, the fatherless birth of offspring in which the embryo develops without fertilization by a male. Now you can add boa constrictors to that short list: A study in Biology Letters documents the case of a boa that gave birth to 22 offspring over the last two years, all of whom are female and born this unusual way.
“Only with the development and application of molecular tools have we truly begun to understand how common this form of reproduction may be,” lead author Warren Booth [says]. Booth, a research associate at North Carolina State University’s Department of Entomology, and his team first suspected something was up when the mother boa constrictor gave birth, twice, to a total of 22 caramel-colored females. The males housed with the female did not carry the gene for this recessive color trait. [Discovery News]
When Booth’s team analyzed the DNA of the young snakes, they found no evidence of paternity by any of the males who’d mated with their mother previously. Furthermore, the chromosomes of the 22 young gave them away.
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The technical way to explain this odd-looking fowl is that it’s “gynandromorphous.” But if you just want to call it “one seriously confused chicken,” that works, too.
For a new study in Nature, Michael Clinton and colleagues investigated a few of these half-male, half-female chickens they obtained from chicken farms. Gynandropmorphs show up now and then not just in chickens, but also in parrots, pigeons, and some other kinds of animals. But scientists weren’t sure how the mix-up happens, since the standard idea for sex differentiation is that the sex hormones released by the gonads either masculinize or feminize the embryo. Clinton’s team discovered that bird cells don’t need to be programmed by hormones. Instead they are inherently male or female, and remain so even if they end up mixed together in the same chicken [BBC News].
The researchers had first assumed that the half-and-half chickens followed the hormone pattern, and that they were females with some sort of chromosomal problem on the male side (the lighter half of the bird in the image, which also sports a large wattle, sturdy breast musculature, and a leg spur on its male side). Instead, they found the chickens to be almost perfectly split between male and female. The hen half was, for the most part, made up of normal female cells with female chromosomes, whereas the cockerel side contained mostly normal male cells with male chromosomes [Nature News].
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Sure, creatures that reproduce asexually get to avoid some of the hangups that come with sex, but the strategy brings its own problems. First and foremost, how do you prevent genetic deterioration without the fresh infusion of new genes that results from the mixing of male and female DNA? For the all-female whiptail lizard, the solution is to hedge its bets.
In a study forthcoming in Nature, researcher Peter Baumann found that each whiptail lizard egg cells contains twice the number of chromosomes you’d expect. In the fertilized egg cell of a sexually reproducing lizard species, you’d expect to see much what you see in humans—23 chromosomes from the father and 23 from the mother combining into 46. (Most human cells contain 46 chromosomes, but egg and sperm cells contain only 23, so that they can combine to give an offspring a compete, but genetically new, set of chromosomes.)
But the whiptail eggs instead begin with two identical copies of each of their mother’s chromosomes, for a total of 92. Those chromosomes then pair with their identical duplicates, and after two cell divisions, a mature egg with 46 chromosomes is produced. Since crossing-over during the cell divisions occurs only between pairs of identical chromosomes, the lizard that develops from the unfertilized egg is identical to its mother [The New York Times].
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Don’t count out the Y chromosome just yet. Far from being in a state of decay, as some studies have suggested, a new study in Nature says the male chromosome in humans is actually evolving at a furious pace.
Study leader David Page of MIT sequenced the human Y chromosome back in 2003, and in the new study his team compares it to the male chromosome of chimpanzees. The scientists expected the two sequences to look very similar. However, while human and chimp DNA generally differ by less than 2 per cent, more than 30 per cent of the Y chromosome differed between the two species [The Times].
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