A Developmental Biology Summit in the High Country

摘要

Biologists have long believed that the diverse body segments of most insects--head segments with antennae, for example, and thoracic segments with wings and legs--evolved from the many identical segments of more primitive arthropods that looked like today's centipedes and millipedes. In the 1980s, researchers thought they might have a simple explanation for the genetic changes responsible for this diversification of segments: a duplication and diversification of genes. But at the Utah meeting, Jennifer Grenier and colleagues in the lab of developmental biologist Sean Carroll at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, described "new results challenging that explanation.