The molecular origin of quantitative morphological evolution

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The diversity of animal forms results from changes in shape, changes in size, as well as the emergence of new characters. The genetic origin of these evolutionary changes begins to be well understood. There is, however, another level of morphological diversification that remains much less understood, the quantitative variation of characters, such as the continuous range of colors or hues that decorate animals. With this project, we propose to use the different shades of gray that ornate the wings of fruit flies species closely related to the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, to address this problem. Leveraging the power of Drosophila genetics, we will examine how the regulation of a pigmentation gene is tuned between species to produce this variation in pigmentation intensity.