Fruit flies 'adapting to climate change'
A fruit fly superimposed over chromosomes from the species
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Friday, 01, Sep 2006 02:57
As the climate has changed over the past few decades, so too has the genetic make-up of fruit flies, a new study has found.
According to US and Spanish researchers, the genetic changes help to protect the Drosophila subobscura fruit fly against warmer temperatures.
The fly, which originally ranged from the Mediterranean Sea to Scandinavia, was accidentally introduced to North and South America in the 1970s and 1980s.
European researchers originally studied the fly's chromosomes 40 years ago and found that sections of them were inverted, almost like a barcode being printed backwards. Inversions were found to be related to latitude.
In the recent study, researchers analysed European flies again, as well as the ones now in the Americas. Shifts in weather patterns were also monitored.
Inversions in fruit fly genetics were found to have increased across the species, so that flies further north had genetic makeup similar to the flies that exist near the equator.
"The genetic shift is remarkably rapid and is detectable even for samples separated by fewer than two decades," the researchers write in their study, published in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.
Raymond Huey, a University of Washington biology professor and the study's co-author, said: "In the long term, this suggests that climate warming is already having genetic effects, at least on these organisms.
"The good news is that these flies may be able to adapt, at least to some extent, to a warming climate. However, organisms with longer intervals between new generations, humans or sequoia trees for example, probably can't adapt nearly as readily."