Tag Archives: Hox genes

Nobel Prizes for studying Drosophila

By | June 21, 2021

The contribution of Drosophila melanogaster as a invertebrate model in understanding basic aspects of biology is immense. This eventually led to many landmark findings, enabling us to unravel many biological puzzles and find cure for many human diseases. Thanks to the continuous efforts of many scientists and their co-workers, has helped in widening the scope… Read More »

Who came first: NK or HOX??? insights from Homeobox genes of Sponges

By | May 7, 2021

In this blog post we take a look into homeobox repertoire of “Sponges-The pore bearers”. Homeobox genes in most primitive organism on earth “Ctenophores”  gave some valuable insights and now we go a bit ahead in tree of life to gain further insights from demosponge Amphimedon queenslandica genome sequence. The first conclusive evidence for presence of… Read More »

Hox genes and link to evolutionary developmental biology

By | May 6, 2021

So much of talk is going around about Hox genes in the field of evolution and some might wonder what makes them so important in this field as well, along with developmental biology. What is that we are going to learn about evolution by studying Hox proteins? or to put it in another way :… Read More »

Nomenclature of Hox genes

By | May 6, 2021

Lots of confusion prevailed in nomenclature Hox genes , even the name Hox was confusing. A hox gene originally referred to any gene coding for a protein with Homeodomain. In the beginning very few genes where known which could be clearly identified with homeotic mutants of Drosophila. Later huge number of genes with Homeodomain were… Read More »

Drosophila Fushi Tarazu : A segmentation gene with ancient Hox function

By | May 6, 2021

Evolution is not always about inventing new proteins but using the same old proteins in different ways to attain a new function and thereby modifying the body plan, leading to the development of new species. Drosophila fushi tarazu serves as a great example for evolution in action and this was demonstrated by Ulrike Lohr lab… Read More »

Edward B. Lewis: A Pioneer in real sense

By | May 5, 2021

Genetics is a discipline initially worked out by Gregor Mendel (Austrian monk) using common pea plants in his garden. Since then many great minds used genetics to understand important problems of biology, including the study of evolution and how plants and animals develop. The power of genetics and its importance to mankind was first time… Read More »

Origin of Helmets in Treehoppers: A beautiful example of evolution at work

By | May 3, 2021

Two developmental biologists Nicholas Gompel and Benjamin Prudhomme, when they were together at the Institute of Developmental Biology of Marseilles-Luminy in France, have unraveled the origin and evolution of helmets in treehoppers. This means these hemipterans have achieved what no other insect was able to in more than 300 million years of evolution : a third… Read More »

Why snakes don’t have legs ?

By | May 3, 2021

Why the most evolved snakes don’t have limbs while the primitive species like python have poorly developed hind limbs (They have pelvic girdle and incompletely developed femur) or to put it in simple words : why snakes don’t have legs???? Imagine a Snake with fore and hind limbs.True it doesn’t give a good picture and… Read More »

How Hox proteins attain specificity in vivo

By | May 2, 2021

In one of the previous posts on iflybio  we talked about Hox genes ,about their properties ,importance in anterior posterior patterning axis in Drosophila and we also seen how these Hox genes come into picture during early embryogenesis.Today we will briefly overview into one of fundamental question in the field of biology “How do Hox… Read More »