Adaptive substitutions underlying cardiac glycoside insensitivity in insects exhibit epistasis in vivo.

Predicting how species will respond to selection pressures requires understanding the factors that constrain their evolution. We use genome engineering of to investigate constraints on the repeated evolution of unrelated herbivorous insects to toxic cardiac glycosides, which primarily occurs via a small subset of possible functionally-relevant substitutions to Na,K-ATPase. Surprisingly, we find that frequently observed adaptive substitutions at two sites, 111 and 122, are lethal when homozygous and adult heterozygotes exhibit dominant neural dysfunction.

Different Evolutionary Strategies To Conserve Chromatin Boundary Function in the Bithorax Complex.

Chromatin boundary elements subdivide chromosomes in multicellular organisms into physically independent domains. In addition to this architectural function, these elements also play a critical role in gene regulation. Here we investigated the evolution of a Drosophila Bithorax complex boundary element called Fab-7, which is required for the proper parasegment specific expression of the homeotic Abd-B gene.

Ferret: a user-friendly Java tool to extract data from the 1000 Genomes Project.

Unlabelled: The 1000 Genomes (1KG) Project provides a near-comprehensive resource on human genetic variation in worldwide reference populations. 1KG variants can be accessed through a browser and through the raw and annotated data that are regularly released on an ftp server. We developed Ferret, a user-friendly Java tool, to easily extract genetic variation information from these large and complex data files.