David Lohman, an epidemiologist with The Graduate Center, CUNY and tThe City College of New York, and his collaborators studied the genome of 45 samples representing 18 butterfly subspecies across Asia to determine their evolutionary history and establish which genes are responsible for the color variation in females. They found that neither the orange nor brown females had a common recent ancestor. Their study appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"The conventional wisdom is that once something evolves and you lose it, it's hard to re-evolve it," said Lohman. "That suggests something is acting like a switch, switching the gene on or off."

The researchers found two DNA nucleotides on theElymnias hypermnestragenome that regulateWntA在孤峰基因与颜色相关的模式rfly species.

TheWntAgene can be switched on to recreate the phenotypic shift, even where it hasn't appeared for several generations. Reaching back into genetic history allows a species to create a variant without having to re-evolve the intermediate biochemical pathways.

"Evolution of a phenotype can be more plastic than we thought," said Shen-Horn Yen, one of Lohman's collaborators from the Department of Biological Sciences, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan.

To Lohman, studyingElymnias hypermnestraencapsulates the study of biodiversity in its entirety. There's a universe of variety in color, form, size, and genetic variability found in a single genus of butterfly.