Nature Communications (Jun 2019)

Convergent genomic signatures of flight loss in birds suggest a switch of main fuel

  • Shengkai Pan,
  • Yi Lin,
  • Qiong Liu,
  • Jinzhi Duan,
  • Zhenzhen Lin,
  • Yusong Wang,
  • Xueli Wang,
  • Sin Man Lam,
  • Zhen Zou,
  • Guanghou Shui,
  • Yu Zhang,
  • Zhengwang Zhang,
  • Xiangjiang Zhan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10682-3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 11

Abstract

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Flight loss has occurred numerous times in bird evolution. Here, the authors examine convergent sites in the exonic and intronic sequences of 48 bird genomes, finding amino-acid changes in two genes, ATGL and ACOT7, with potential implications for a change in metabolism rather than anatomy.