ArticleNature communications2016
Ancient balancing selection at tan underlies female colour dimorphism in Drosophila erecta.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- microRNAs affecting development of body pigmentation in adult Drosophila melanogaster.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The potential of inversions to accumulate balanced sexual antagonism is supported by simulations andeLife · 2025Article
- Polymorphism-Aware Models in RevBayes: Species Trees, Disentangling Balancing Selection, and GC-Biased Gene Conversion.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
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- Long-term evolution of quantitative traits in the Drosophila melanogaster species subgroup.Genetica · 2022Article
- Evolution of assortative mating following selective introgression of pigmentation genes between twoEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Modular Evolution of the Drosophila Metabolome.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- The effect of theBiology letters · 2021Article
- Genetic architecture of a body colour cline in Drosophila americana.Molecular ecology · 2020Article
- The population genetics of crypsis in vertebrates: recent insights from mice, hares, and lizards.Heredity · 2020Review
- Quantifying the extent of morphological homoplasy: A phylogenetic analysis of 490 characters inEvolution letters · 2019Article
- bric à brac (bab), a central player in the gene regulatory network that mediates thermal plasticity of pigmentation in Drosophila melanogaster.PLoS genetics · 2018Article
- The Evolution of Gene Expression in cis and trans.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2018Review
- The flexible stem hypothesis: evidence from genetic data.Development genes and evolution · 2017Review
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- The pdm3 Locus Is a Hotspot for Recurrent Evolution of Female-Limited Color Dimorphism in Drosophila.Current biology : CB · 2016Article
- Phenotypic Plasticity through Transcriptional Regulation of the Evolutionary Hotspot Gene tan in Drosophila melanogaster.PLoS genetics · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Dimorphic traits are ubiquitous in nature, but the evolutionary factors leading to dimorphism are largely unclear. We investigate a potential case of sexual mimicry in Drosophila erecta, in which females show contrasting resemblance to males. We map the genetic basis of this sex-limited colour dimorphism to a region containing the gene tan. We find a striking signal of ancient balancing selection at the 'male-specific enhancer' of tan, with exceptionally high sequence divergence between light and dark alleles, suggesting that this dimorphism has been adaptively maintained for millions of years. Using transgenic reporter assays, we confirm that these enhancer alleles encode expression differences that are predicted to generate this pigmentation dimorphism. These results are compatible with the theoretical prediction that divergent phenotypes maintained by selection can evolve simple genetic architectures.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.