After mating about 55,000 pairs of fruit flies and sifting through 333,000 daughter flies, a research team found six sons that each had mutations in the same gene that helped make two fruit fly species unique from each other. Credit: Jim Woolace, Fred Hutch News Service.
Nitin Phadnis and Harmit Malik set out to conduct an experiment that could solve a century-old evolutionary puzzle: How did two related fruit fly species arise from one? Years after they began their quest, they finally have an answer.
The existence of a gene that helps make each of these fruit fly species unique and separate from each other had been guessed at since 1940, following experiments decades earlier in which geneticists first noticed that the two types of flies, when mated, had only daughters—no sons.
Scientists had previously discovered two other genes involved in driving the fruit fly species apart, but they knew those two genes weren’t the full story.
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