The calmodulin pathway and evolution of elongated beak morphology in Darwin's finches

Arhat Abzhanov, Winston P. Kuo, Christine Hartmann, B. Rosemary Grant, Peter R. Grant and Clifford J. Tabin ()
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Arhat Abzhanov: Harvard Medical School
Winston P. Kuo: Harvard Medical School
Christine Hartmann: Institute of Molecular Pathology
B. Rosemary Grant: Princeton University
Peter R. Grant: Princeton University
Clifford J. Tabin: Harvard Medical School

Nature, 2006, vol. 442, issue 7102, 563-567

Abstract: The long and the short of it A few years ago the depth and thickness of beaks of various species of Darwin's finches, the birds forever linked in the textbooks to adaptive radiation by natural selection, were found to correlate with expression of Bmp4 (bone morphogenetic protein 4). At that time a candidate screen did not yield any genes that could have been responsible for the evolution of different beak lengths. Now DNA microarray analysis of transcripts in the beak primordia of different Darwin's finch embryos shows that levels of calmodulin, a molecule involved in Ca2+ signalling, are correlated with beak length. With these two pathways modulating different dimensions of beak growth, a mechanism capable of producing a wide range of beak structures under different selective conditions can be envisaged.

Date: 2006
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DOI: 10.1038/nature04843

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