Contribution of Distal-less to quantitative variation in butterfly eyespots

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The colour patterns decorating butterfly wings provide ideal material to study the reciprocal interactions between evolution and development. They are visually compelling products of selection, often with a clear adaptive value, and are amenable to a detailed developmental characterization1. Research on wing-pattern evolution and development has focused on the eyespots of the tropical butterfly Bicyclus anynana2. There is quantitative variation for several features of eyespot morphology3,4,5 but the actual genes contributing to such variation are unknown. On the other hand, studies of gene expression patterns in wing primordia have implicated different developmental pathways in eyespot formation6,7,8,9,10,11. To link these two sets of information we need to identify which genes within the implicated pathways contribute to the quantitative variation accessible to natural selection. Here we begin to bridge this gap by demonstrating linkage between DNA polymorphisms in the candidate gene Distal-less (Dll) and eyespot size in B. anynana.