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BUTTERFLY EXAPTATIONS. "Heliconius possess a unique ability among butterflies to feed on pollen. Pollen feeding significantly extends their lifespan, and is thought to have been important to the diversification of the genus." https://lnkd.in/essFGXS View in LinkedIn

DOGMA. "A central tenet of the nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution is that extraneous DNA sequences can be present within genomes, provided that they do not significantly impact the fitness of the organism." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

BUTTERFLY GENE DUPLICATION. "Gene Duplication and Gene Expression Changes Play a Role in the Evolution of Candidate Pollen Feeding Genes in Heliconius Butterflies." https://lnkd.in/essFGXS View in LinkedIn

SELECTION INVISIBLE. "The creation and loss of TF-binding motifs or cryptic transcriptional start sites in these same intergenic regions will equally be invisible to natural selection, provided that these do not drastically alter the expression of any nearby genes or cause the production of stable toxic transcripts." (TF = transcription factor). https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

HEMOGLOBIN GENES. "The subfamilies of genes that encode the different subunit chains of Hb are ontogenetically regulated such that functionally distinct Hb isoforms are expressed during different developmental stages. In some vertebrate taxa, functional differentiation between co-expressed Hb isoforms may also contribute to physiologically important divisions of labor." http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/content/31/3/223 View in LinkedIn

ACCUMULATION OF MUTATIONS. "Given the overall low figures for multicellular organisms in general, we would expect that natural selection would be powerless to stop the accumulation of certain genomic alterations over the entirety of metazoan evolution. One type of mutation that fits this description is intergenic insertions, be they transposable elements, pseudogenes, or random sequence." http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004351 View in LinkedIn

DUPLICATED HEMOGLOBIN GENES. "Gene Duplication and Evolutionary Innovations in Hemoglobin-Oxygen Transport. During vertebrate evolution, duplicated hemoglobin (Hb) genes diverged with respect to functional properties as well as the developmental timing of expression." https://lnkd.in/exfGXzx View in LinkedIn

STARCH DIET CHANGES. "Copy number variation has been observed in the amylase genes of humans, with increased expression and corresponding protein levels being associated with a high starch diet." https://lnkd.in/essFGXS View in LinkedIn

HUMAN DIET ADAPTATIONS. "The continuous production of lactase into late human development allowed for adult digestion of lactose in milk, and is thought to be due to cis-regulatory changes in an enhancer region upstream of the lactase gene." https://lnkd.in/essFGXS View in LinkedIn

GENE DUPLICATION. "We find evidence for both gene duplication and expression regulation changes during the evolution of mouthpart-specific gene expression, and these candidate genes provide a starting point from which to examine the genetic basis of pollen feeding." https://lnkd.in/essFGXS View in LinkedIn