StemCell Therapy

Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, she systematically disabled five shared leg-patterning genes in Parhyale and in insects, and found those genes corresponded to the six leg segments that are farthest from the body wall. Parhyale, though, has an additional, seventh leg segment next to its body wall. Where did that segment go, she wondered?

And so I started digging in the literature, and I found this really old idea that had been proposed in 1893, that insects had incorporated their proximal [closest to body] leg region into the body wall, she said.

But I still didnt have the wing part of the story, she said. So I kept reading and reading, and I came across this 1980s theory that not only did insects incorporate their proximal leg region into the body wall, but the little lobes on the leg later moved up onto the back and formed the wings. I thought, wow, my genomic and embryonic data supports these old theories.

It would have been impossible to resolve this longstanding riddle without the tools now available to probe the genomes of a myriad of organisms, including Parhyale, which the Patel lab has developed as the most genetically tractable research organism among the crustaceans.

In addition to his role as MBL director, Patel is appointed at UChicago asa professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy,and ofMolecular Genetics and Cell Biology.

People get very excited by the idea that something like insect wings may have been a novel innovation of evolution, Patel said.But one of the stories that is emerging from genomic comparisons is that nothing is brand new; everything came from somewhere. And you can, in fact, figure out from where.

Citation: Knockout of crustacean leg patterning genes suggests that insect wings and body wall evolved from ancient leg segments,Bruce and Patel,Nature Ecology & Evolution, Dec. 1, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-01349-0

Funding: National Science Foundation

Adapted from anarticle originally posted by the Marine Biological Laboratory

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How insect wings evolved from the legs of an ancestral crustacean - UChicago News

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