New Publication: Genetic parallelism across 120 million years of convergent evolution

In our new paper in PLoS Biology we show that mimicry evolution across multiple, distantly related lineages is driven by recurrent mutations in the same place in the genome. The work was led by postdoc in the group, Yacine Ben Chehida, together with PhD students Edd Page and Eva der Heijden, working with Kanchon Dasmahapatra in York and Joana Meier at the Sanger Institute, respectively. 

Yacine explains: "This study shows that the convergent wing colors and patterns observed in many distantly related Andean butterflies and moths are controlled by regulatory elements in the same two genes. This suggests that very similar wing patterns can arise through natural selection repeatedly acting on changes in these genes, even across deeply divergent species. Taken together, these findings indicate that evolution can be surprisingly predictable, both in the emergence of similar traits and in the genetic bases underlying them."