Abstract
The Same but Different: Worms Reveal the Pervasiveness of Developmental System Drift
Highlights
For at least 50 years, biologists have appreciated that some genes are universally conserved, some are restricted to particular clades, and some are found only in one species
The ideal approach to characterizing the conservation of gene function would compare the effects of perturbing ortholog activity in organisms with similar anatomy, physiology, and laboratory tractability
But a small number of striking shifts in the ‘‘wiring’’ of otherwise conserved metabolic circuits were observed. Both fushi tarazu and oskar, first identified for their roles in patterning the Drosophila melangaster embryo, may have initially functioned in the central nervous system and were only later co-opted into early development [7,8]. These studies confirm that even when a trait is under strong stabilizing selection, with enough time, the orthologous genes that produce it can evolve surprisingly distinct roles—a phenomenon called developmental system drift (DSD) [9]
Summary
For at least 50 years, biologists have appreciated that some genes are universally conserved, some are restricted to particular clades, and some are found only in one species. The ideal approach to characterizing the conservation of gene function would compare the effects of perturbing ortholog activity in organisms with similar anatomy, physiology, and laboratory tractability. Though we might expect that under these circumstances essentially all ortholog perturbations would give identical results, a small but growing literature suggests this is not necessarily the case.
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