Single amino acid change alters the ability to specify male or female organ identity.

ABSTRACT: The molecular mechanisms underlying the developmental processes that shape living organisms provide a basis to understand the evolution of biological complexity. Gene duplication allows biological functions to become separated, leading to increased complexity through subfunctionalization. Recently, the relative contributions to morphological evolution of changes to the regulatory and/or coding regions of duplicated genes have been the subject of debate. Duplication generated multiple copies of the MADS-box transcription factor genes that play essential roles in specifying organ identity in the flower, making this evolutionary novelty a good model to investigate the nature of the changes necessary to drive subfunctionalization. Here, we show that naturally occurring variation at a single am

SUBMITTER: Airoldi CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2973880 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature