Small genetic changes prevent a normally fatal poison from killing monarch butterflies.
By editing these genes into laboratory fruit flies using CRISPR technology, scientists have reconstructed evolution and instantly conferred – in the flies – the same toxin resistance enjoyed by monarchs.
“We experimentally went back in evolutionary time to reconstruct an event that happened naturally several times, several million years ago,” said Anurag Agrawal, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and co-senior author on a new paper published with University of California, Berkeley, colleagues in Nature, Oct. 2.
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