Surprise RNAs solve mystery of how butterfly wings get their colorful patterns

A mutant butterfly for sale on eBay has helped upend naturalists’ picture of how butterfly wings acquire their intricate variety of red, yellow, white, and black stripes. It and recent research into other butterflies shows how visible traits in many animals may be controlled by the same underexplored genetic regulatory mechanism, based not on proteins, but on RNA. In 2016, geneticists thought they had pinned much of the wing-pattern variation on a protein-encoding gene called cortex . But three teams have now proved that a different gene, previously missed because it overlaps with cortex , is the key. Its final product is not protein, but RNA that regulates genes responsible for the pigmentation patterns of black and other hues on the wings. One team also showed the RNA is broken down into a smaller RNA that fine-tunes the production of the colors. “They solved a puzzle that had left everyone in the community wondering,” says Nicolas Gompel, a developmental biologist at the University of Bonn. The discovery, detailed in three preprints this month, also represents the first time long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), so-called because it does not code for proteins, has been linked to the evolution of a visible trait in animals. “Now we have to pay more attention to noncoding RNA,” says Ilik Saccheri, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool and a member of one of the teams that had focused on cortex . For...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research