Recycling old genes to get new traits: How social behavior evolves in bees
Monday, June 8, 2020 - 09:50
in Biology & Nature
A team working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) found evidence to support a long-debated mode of evolution, revealing how evolution captures environmental variation to teach old genes new tricks: Sweat bees switch from solitary to social behavior, repurposing ancient sets of genes that originally evolved to regulate the development of other traits.