Paleomolecular biology unravels the evolutionary mystery of vertebrate UV vision: Fig. 1.

Paleomolecular biology unravels the evolutionary mystery of vertebrate UV vision.

F rom the detection of a changing traffic light to the relaxing sight of Vincent van Gogh’s ‘‘Sunflower,’’ color vision plays an important role in our lives. But, to the eyes of a hummingbird or goldfish, we humans are partially color-blind, as they can see what is known as UV, to which we are simply blind. How did we lose this sensitivity, or, alternatively, how did they acquire it? In this is...

The unsolved mystery of vision

Vision looms large in neuroscience--it is the subject of a gigantic literature and four Nobel prizes--but there is a growing realization that there are problems with the textbook explanation of how mammalian vision works. Here we will summarize the evidence behind this disquiet. In effect, we shall present a portrait of a field that is 'stuck'. Our initial focus, because it is our area of exper...

Genome biology of the cyclostomes and insights into the evolutionary biology of vertebrate genomes.

The jawless vertebrates (lamprey and hagfish) are the closest extant outgroups to all jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes) and can therefore provide critical insight into the evolution and basic biology of vertebrate genomes. As such, it is notable that the genomes of lamprey and hagfish possess a capacity for rearrangement that is beyond anything known from the gnathostomes. Like the jawed vertebr...

Synthesis of Experimental Molecular Biology and Evolutionary Biology: An Example from the World of Vision.

Natural selection has played an important role in establishing various phenotypes, but the molecular mechanisms of phenotypic adaptation are not well understood. The slow progress is a consequence of mutagenesis experiments in which present-day molecules were used and of the limited scope of statistical methods used to detect adaptive evolution. To fully appreciate phenotypic adaptation, the pr...

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