Question

1. Earlier research has implicated the BMP4 gene as being important in the shape of birds’ beaks. A Genome Wide Association Study of beak shape in finches from the Galapagos Islands identified a number of loci that contribute to beak shape in finch species but BMP4 was not among the candidate genes identified in that study.
   1. Speculate about why BMP4 was not found in the GWAS experiment.

2. As the genome sequence for the finches studied in the GWAS experiment is now publicly available, how could you use the sequence to determine whether or not BMP4 is involved in beak shape differences in finches?

Answer 1

We studied a group of darwin's finch species with different beak shapes.

We found that TGFBIIr, bita catenin, and Dikkopf-3 the top candidate gene from a cDNA microarray screen, are different expressed in the developing premaxillary bone of embryos of species with different beak shapes. Furthermore, our function experiment demonstrate that this molecule from a regulatory network governing the mythology of the premaxillary bone, which differs from the network controlling the prenasal cartilage, but has the same species specific domains of expression.

This Result offer potential mechanism that may expalin how the tightly coupled dipth and width dimantion can envolve this.

Studied of PNC formation in darwin finches indentified two signalis molecule Bmp4 and CaM that regulate early differences in beak morphogenesis and so provide a partial explanation for beak shape differents between finch species.

It is not known wether molecule such as Bmp4 and CaM have the same role at this crucial important stage of devlopment and what the relative importance of pnc and pmx tissue modules is in establishing the species-specific difference. morphological and genetic studies have failed to explain how beak depth and width became uncoupled in the evolutionary radiation of darwins finches.