Gene-altered flies testify to global warming

S.A.M.

S.A.M.

uniquely dreadful
Valued Senior Member
Populations of fruit flies on three separate continents have independently evolved identical gene changes within just two decades, apparently to cope with global warming.

“What we’re showing is that global warming is leaving its imprint on genes,” says Raymond Huey at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who made the discovery with colleagues. “For this to happen in such a short time-frame in so many parts of the world is rather disturbing,” he says.

“At the rates found, the 'warm-adapted inversions' are migrating north at 100 kilometres per 25 years, or 400 kilometres per century,” says Huey. “That’s a lot of gene change.”

It was not possible to establish definitively whether flies had invaded from warmer latitudes, or whether the “warm” adaptation became dominant through selection. “The selection explanation is almost certainly correct because there is excellent evidence that selection acts on inversion [variants] in Drosophila,” says Ary Hoffmann of the University of Melbourne, who has studied “gene migration” in flies in Australia.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9896-genealtered-flies-testify-to-global-warming.html

How can we confirm this finding?

If true, would it be theoretically possible to monitor global warming using data like this?
 
Speaking of fruit flies!!..A tiny fruit fly has 13,601 genes.

We humans have about 30,000 genes, not the 100,000-140,000 the scientists had anticipated, since we are far more evolved than other life forms.

"Humbling" was the prevalent adjective used by the scientific teams and the media to describe the principal finding - that the human genome contains not the anticipated 100,000 - 140,000 genes (the stretches of DNA that direct the production of amino-acids and proteins) but only some 30,000+ -- little more than double the 13,601 genes of a fruit fly and barely fifty percent more than the roundworm's 19,098. What a comedown from the pinnacle of the genomic Tree of Life! Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes.

Well as for the global warming scenario, flies will increase in population as they migrate to variable enviromental habitats but in theory fly migration alone is not particularly effective in drawing up a sustainable or continous chart for measuring global warming. Migratory patterns and feeding behaviours of organisms way down in the food chain is a resonable method to deduce how they affect multi-cellular life forms. Data gathered from these results could be relevant enough to approximate the optimum range of damage to the ecosystem as a whole.
 
All roads lead to reversible phosphorylation.

(I need to put this on a T-shirt)
 
yep, gene regulation seems to be the key to complexity.

In a way the genome of drosophila is more evolved than ours. It has been cleaned up.
 
I think the future of genomic research will probably go into comparative genomics in gene regulation and the possible (?evolutionary) significance of the vast reservoir of junk DNA, (judging from the more highly conserved sequences).
 
And the low number of human genes also suggests that epigenetic factors play a large role in human development. "Junk DNA" accounts for a huge percentage of the human genome (is the Junk DNA in the genome or outside of it? Is the 'genome' only genes...? Hmm.) Junk DNA is remarkably conserved.

Another factor is alternative gene splicing.

Off-topic of course.

Edit: Damn! I got distracted and you all beat me to it!!! Damn you to hell!!!!!

Methylation too. I have a link to a web site that gathers epigenetic research together, but it's in my home computer.... I think I made a link to it in some thread from ago. Let me look.
 
We have a botanicals center on campus that works on phytoestrogens. I wonder what other dietary components could function in gene imprinting (methylation or histone modification). Time for research. :)
 
Here is one review:
Nutritional genomics (nutrigenomics), the junction between health, diet, and genomics, can be seen as the combination of molecular nutrition and genomics. The diverse tissue and organ-specific effects of bioactive dietary components include gene-expression patterns (transcriptome); organization of the chromatin (epigenome); protein-expression patterns, including posttranslational modifications (proteome); as well as metabolite profiles (metabolome). Nutrigenomics will promote an increased understanding of how nutrition influences metabolic pathways and homeostatic control, how this regulation is disturbed in the early phases of diet-related disease, and the extent to which individual sensitizing genotypes contribute to such diseases. Eventually, nutrigenomics will lead to evidence-based dietary intervention strategies for restoring health and fitness and for preventing diet-related disease.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...uids=16567153&query_hl=12&itool=pubmed_DocSum


And one more, in relation to the metabolic syndrome:

Human epidemiological studies and appropriately designed dietary interventions in animal models have provided considerable evidence to suggest that maternal nutritional imbalance and metabolic disturbances, during critical time windows of development, may have a persistent effect on the health of the offspring and may even be transmitted to the next generation. We now need to explain the mechanisms involved in generating such responses. The idea that epigenetic changes associated with chromatin remodeling and regulation of gene expression underlie the developmental programming of metabolic syndrome is gaining acceptance. Epigenetic alterations have been known to be of importance in cancer for approximately 2 decades. This has made it possible to decipher epigenetic codes and machinery and has led to the development of a new generation of drugs now in clinical trials. Although less conspicuous, epigenetic alterations have also been progressively shown to be relevant to common diseases such as atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes. Imprinted genes, with their key roles in controlling feto-placental nutrient supply and demand and their epigenetic lability in response to nutrients, may play an important role in adaptation/evolution.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/..._uids=15983188&query_hl=9&itool=pubmed_DocSum
 
“What we’re showing is that global warming is leaving its imprint on genes,” says Raymond Huey at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who made the discovery with colleagues. “For this to happen in such a short time-frame in so many parts of the world is rather disturbing,” he says.
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I always thought the appeal of using Drosophila in genetic studies was their ability to change genes "in such a short time-frame."

This alarm is laughable. omg one of the most genetically mutable of organisms has *surprise* changed some genes!
 
Roman said:
I always thought the appeal of using Drosophila in genetic studies was their ability to change genes "in such a short time-frame."

This alarm is laughable. omg one of the most genetically mutable of organisms has *surprise* changed some genes!
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Good, a dissenter. :)
What is your take on this research? Is it just a correlation?
 
An organism that can rapidly change its genetics to match enivornmental change will of course go through genetic change to adapt to a changing environment.

I imagine any temperature fluctuation over a handful of years would be mirrored in the genes of a critter that hatches and reproduces in the same week.
 
So the gene adaptation in Drosophila is a reflection of the change in environment?

What about migration patterns? Are they as adaptable as genes?
 
I found this link giving several examples.

http://www.warmplanet.org/migration/

THE nuthatch, one of Britain's smallest birds, has begun breeding in Scotland for the first time, it was revealed yesterday.

Until now, the tiny woodland bird has been totally restricted to England and Wales. But RSPB Scotland experts believe that milder weather patterns, due to climate change, have encouraged the nuthatch to make its home in parts of southern Scotland. And populations are now steadily making their way north towards the Central Belt.
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Scientists studying Yosemite National Park's bountiful wildlife have found that several animal species have moved to higher altitudes, an uphill migration possibly spawned by the grinding effects of global warming on one of the nation's most protected wildernesses
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Looks like those who cannot adapt may not last.

Climate change could be posing a substantial threat to many of the UK's birds and animals, according to a new government report.

The study, commissioned by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra), suggests that global warming could be disrupting traditional breeding and migration patterns as well as increasing diseases in wildlife.
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Ocean currents too!

A "unique" sighting of a school of giant fin whales off the west coast of Wales may indicate changes in the ocean currents, a zoologist said yesterday. Six fin whales were spotted last week by a group of conservationists in the Irish Sea, about 10 miles off the Pembrokeshire coast
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Invert_nexus: the genome is defined as the complete set of genetic material. This also includes "junk-DNA" as well as other non-coding gene regions.

Roman: Drosophila has not a more mutable genome than other eukaryotes per se, but rather a short generation time. At least I am not aware that wild-type Drosophilas accumulate more mutations per generation than other species. The real surprising thing, however is that there appears to be some kind of congruent evolution of Drosophila in different regions, pointing to some global influence.
 
CharonZ said:
Invert_nexus: the genome is defined as the complete set of genetic material. This also includes "junk-DNA" as well as other non-coding gene regions.

Roman: Drosophila has not a more mutable genome than other eukaryotes per se, but rather a short generation time. At least I am not aware that wild-type Drosophilas accumulate more mutations per generation than other species. The real surprising thing, however is that there appears to be some kind of congruent evolution of Drosophila in different regions, pointing to some global influence.
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It might not be a wholly global influence. It might be an interaction with genes that already exist in the organism and the environment. For all we know, there is a built-in negative reinforcement mechanism that does this automatically.

For instance, the shape of a protein is what gives it its power. Changes in temperature, cause proteins to slightly fold more or less, which is how the mechanisms for temperature-regulation are handled in almost all organisms. The shape of the protein is affected by the temperature of the organism, which results in some process which dampens the current trend. It might mean the increase or decrease in metabolism, or a neurological firing that makes the organism seek a warmer or cooler place.

Well, for all we know, a transcription factor, or a DNA polymerase could make changes during meiosis due to slight changes in the environment. This mechanism might have been built-in millions of years ago to combat just these sort of "rapid" changes in environmental trends.

The point is, just because we are finding a change in the sequence does not mean it is 100% in reaction to the environment, and caused by random selection of mutations. It could be a mechanism that is built for this purpose. And these mechanisms are very difficult to find, even if you know where and when to look.

As a side note, there is no such thing as "junk DNA". The stuff that geneticists call "junk" have a very specific and important function. Some of it is a timing mechanism. Some is a buffer to prevent local areas from interacting. Some is stuff that is only turned on when needed. All of it has a function, we just don't know that function yet for all sequences of pairs.

And there is no rule for the number of base-pairs correllating to a "measure" of how evolved, complex, or advance an organism is. Counting the base-pairs tells you absolutely nothing. We just don't yet understand what the significance could possibly be for these numbers. What we do know is that genes interact with eacy other in a way that allows vast complexity to arise out of relative simplicity. Very few genes can cause enormous change.
 
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