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Butterfly Eyespots Evolved Via Cooption Of An Ancestral Gene-Regulatory Network That Also Patterns Antennae, Legs, And Wings, Suriya Narayanan Murugesan, Heidi Connahs, Yuji Matsuoka, Mainak Das Gupta, Galen J. Tiong, Manizah Huq, Thomas Werner, Et. Al.
Butterfly Eyespots Evolved Via Cooption Of An Ancestral Gene-Regulatory Network That Also Patterns Antennae, Legs, And Wings, Suriya Narayanan Murugesan, Heidi Connahs, Yuji Matsuoka, Mainak Das Gupta, Galen J. Tiong, Manizah Huq, Thomas Werner, Et. Al.
Michigan Tech Publications
Butterfly eyespots are beautiful novel traits with an unknown developmental origin. Here we show that eyespots likely originated via cooption of parts of an ancestral appendage gene-regulatory network (GRN) to novel locations on the wing. Using comparative transcriptome analysis, we show that eyespots cluster most closely with antennae, relative to multiple other tissues. Furthermore, three genes essential for eyespot development, (), (), and (), share similar regulatory connections as those observed in the antennal GRN. CRISPR knockout of -regulatory elements (CREs) for and led to the loss of eyespots, antennae, legs, and also wings, demonstrating that these CREs are highly …