Controls for Animals' Color Designs Revealed

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2010) — The vivid colors and designs animals use to interact with their environments have awed and inspired since before people learned to draw on the cave wall.

But how different creatures in the animal kingdom -- from colorful birds and reef fish to butterflies and snakes -- make and deploy their artful designs is one of nature's deepest secrets. Now, however, a team of researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has exposed the fine details of how animals make new body ornamentation from scratch. The work, the result of years-long and laborious experimentation, is published April 7 in the journal Nature.

"How do you generate complex patterns? This is a question that has interested biologists for a really long time," says Sean Carroll, a UW-Madison molecular biologist and the senior author of the Nature report. "In this case, we at first had no clue. But now we think we've figured out all the key ingredients and we believe they are generally applicable (to many animals)."

The new study is important because it is the first to provide concrete evidence for a long-hypothesized system for generating animal color patterns, be they stripes, spots or any of the myriad designs animals use to camouflage themselves or find a mate. In particular, the Wisconsin group is the first to identify a color-inducing morphogen, a diffusible protein that tells certain cells to make pigment.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100407134812.htm

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Love this stuff...

[slackmaster]

2. They still haven't explained Samantha

She looks like pieces of three or four cats sewn together.

[n2doc]

3. What is that she brought in? a Gopher?

Probably the worst thing about my cats- getting "treats" from them....


ps pretty kitty...

[slackmaster]

4. Yes, a pocket gopher that attempted to take up residence in my vegetable garden

Sam is a good hunter. She's killed at least five different species of rodents in the last year.

[mod mom]

5. Eeeek! you could have posted a warning....

some of us have rodent phobias.

[BadgerKid]

6. Cool.

I remember learning about 10 years ago about the patterning hypothesis, when "complexity theory" was all the rage.