What is it about?

We often think of the evolution of differences between females and males as truces in long-running conflicts between the sexes. This is because such traits are often a boon to one sex and a hindrance to the other. We discovered that butterfly females can acquire ultraviolet color vision without ever involving the males when a color vision gene is copied to the female-specific W chromosome.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Our findings show that some female butterflies have ultraviolet color vision while some male butterflies are ultraviolet color blind due to a color vision gene duplicating to a female-specific chromosome and persisting because of an advantage it confers to females. Two significant findings are that: a) the genetic basis of a sexually dimorphic trait can be due to autosome-to-sex chromosome duplication rather than to changes in gene regulation and b) we identify a novel mechanism for resolving genetic antagonism between the sexes, that in essence side-steps the conflict.

Perspectives

I consider this to be the most significant paper to come out of my lab in more than a decade. As a scientist and educator, this paper is especially meaningful for me because an undergraduate (later a post-baccalaureate) researcher made a key discovery while helping us curate the butterfly's genome which together with the fantastic efforts of other team members resulted in the central insights of this paper. This article also led to a reporter from the New York Times contacting me. Her ability to communicate the primary discovery which is that female butterflies literally see the world differently than male butterflies was thrilling to read.

Adriana Briscoe
University of California Irvine

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Sex-linked gene traffic underlies the acquisition of sexually dimorphic UV color vision in Heliconius butterflies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2301411120.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page