Unearthing the Evolutionary Origins of Insect Wings | The Scientist
For more than a century, researchers have argued over the evolutionary origin of insect wings. Although many hypotheses have been proposed, biologists typically support one of two competing ideas: that wings evolved as an outgrowth from the tergum, a part of the body wall on an insect91海角乱伦檚 back, or that they originated in the pleura, the insect91海角乱伦檚 sides, which are themselves generally thought to be derived from ancestral leg segments. 91海角乱伦淸T]hese two schools of thought have been in an intellectual battle for decades,91海角乱伦 Miami University evolutionary biologist Yoshi Tomoyasu tells The Scientist in an email. He calls the origin of wings 91海角乱伦渙ne of the major mysteries in biology.91海角乱伦
When PhD student Heather Bruce began a last-minute thesis project on crustacean leg segments, she had no idea that she was wading into this complicated and long-standing debate. It was 2016, and Bruce was working in Nipam Patel91海角乱伦檚 lab at the University of California, Berkeley, with a little shrimp-like critter called Parhyale hawaiensis, often used in developmental and genetics research.