Geneva- The fingers of the human being and other vertebrates were not formed from scratch, but come from the recycling of an ancient region of the genome of the fish responsible for the sewer, an organ where their digestive, excretory and player systems converge, concludes a scientific study published in the Nature Magazine.
The research of experts from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausana, the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the College of Parisian France and the American universities of Harvard and Chicagochallenges that the genomic origin of fingers in land animals is linked to the fins, despite its morphological similarity.
To reach these conclusions, experts have compared vast regions of genomes in the DNA of mice and fish through CRISPR technology, which allows genetic “edition”, a UNIGE statement said.
“The common characteristic between the sewer and the fingers is that they represent terminal parts, in one case the end of a digestive tract, and on the other hand and feet,” explained the professor of the University of Geneva and the College of France Denis Duboule, initiator of the study.
Therefore, “instead of building a new regulatory system for the fingers, nature recycled a mechanism that already existed, initially active in the sewer,” he concluded.
The study defends that they are not so much operational genes, encoders, are those that evolve, but, above them, the “architecture” that regulates them, which opens the door to new questions about the evolutionary mechanisms between ancestral and current species.
The finding seeks to improve understanding around the colonization of the emerged land, 380 million years ago, by species evolved from others that until then had only inhabited in the aquatic environment.