ArticleeLife2015
Quantitative system drift compensates for altered maternal inputs to the gap gene network of the scuttle fly Megaselia abdita.
Article in eLife, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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38 citing papers in PubMed, 86 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mechanisms of Phenotypic Evolution from Molecules to Organisms: Integrating Evolutionary Biochemistry and Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2026Article
- Asymmetric chromatin accessibility underlies anterior-posterior axis specification in moth fly embryos.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- System drift in the evolution of plant meristem development.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Genomic resources for the scuttle fly Megaselia abdita: a model organism for comparative developmental studies in flies.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2025Article
- Breaking anterior-posterior symmetry in the moth flybioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Comparative transcriptomics in serial organs uncovers early and pan-organ developmental changes associated with organ-specific morphological adaptation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Deriving a genetic regulatory network from an optimization principle.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Understanding developmental system drift.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- Robustness and innovation in synthetic genotype networks.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A synthetic synthesis to explore animal evolution and development.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- The origin of RNA interference: Adaptive or neutral evolution?PLoS biology · 2022Article
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- Time and space in segmentation.Interface focus · 2021Article
- Homology of process: developmental dynamics in comparative biology.Interface focus · 2021Article
- Implications of diffusion and time-varying morphogen gradients for the dynamic positioning and precision of bistable gene expression boundaries.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
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- An Atlas of Transcription Factors Expressed in Male Pupal Terminalia ofG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- Classification-Based Inference of Dynamical Models of Gene Regulatory Networks.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- Quantitative Comparison of the Anterior-Posterior Patterning System in the Embryos of FiveG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The segmentation gene network in insects can produce equivalent phenotypic outputs despite differences in upstream regulatory inputs between species. We investigate the mechanistic basis of this phenomenon through a systems-level analysis of the gap gene network in the scuttle fly Megaselia abdita (Phoridae). It combines quantification of gene expression at high spatio-temporal resolution with systematic knock-downs by RNA interference (RNAi). Initiation and dynamics of gap gene expression differ markedly between M. abdita and Drosophila melanogaster, while the output of the system converges to equivalent patterns at the end of the blastoderm stage. Although the qualitative structure of the gap gene network is conserved, there are differences in the strength of regulatory interactions between species. We term such network rewiring 'quantitative system drift'. It provides a mechanistic explanation for the developmental hourglass model in the dipteran lineage. Quantitative system drift is likely to be a widespread mechanism for developmental evolution.
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