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van’t Hof, Arjen E., Campagne, Pascal, Rigden, Daniel J., Yung, Carl J., Lingley, Jessica, Quail, Michael A., Hall, Neil 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2808-0009, Darby, Alistair C. and Saccheri, Ilik J.
(2016)
The industrial melanism mutation in British peppered moths is a transposable element.
Nature, 534 (7605).
pp. 102-105.
ISSN 0028-0836
Abstract
Discovering the mutational events that fuel adaptation to environmental change remains an important challenge for evolutionary biology. The classroom example of a visible evolutionary response is industrial melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia): the replacement, during the Industrial Revolution, of the common pale typica form by a previously unknown black (carbonaria) form, driven by the interaction between bird predation and coal pollution. The carbonaria locus has been coarsely localized to a 200-kilobase region, but the specific identity and nature of the sequence difference controlling the carbonaria–typica polymorphism, and the gene it influences, are unknown. Here we show that the mutation event giving rise to industrial melanism in Britain was the insertion of a large, tandemly repeated, transposable element into the first intron of the gene cortex. Statistical inference based on the distribution of recombined carbonaria haplotypes indicates that this transposition event occurred around 1819, consistent with the historical record. We have begun to dissect the mode of action of the carbonaria transposable element by showing that it increases the abundance of a cortex transcript, the protein product of which plays an important role in cell-cycle regulation, during early wing disc development. Our findings fill a substantial knowledge gap in the iconic example of microevolutionary change, adding a further layer of insight into the mechanism of adaptation in response to natural selection. The discovery that the mutation itself is a transposable element will stimulate further debate about the importance of ‘jumping genes’ as a source of major phenotypic novelty.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Oct 2020 00:01 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2022 07:15 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/77205 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/nature17951 |
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