RESEARCH ARTICLE Ancient mechanisms for the evolution of the bicoid homeodomain’s function in fly development Qinwen Liu1†, Pinar Onal2†, Rhea R Datta2†‡, Julia M Rogers3,4, Urs Schmidt-Ott5, Martha L Bulyk3,4,6, Stephen Small2*, Joseph W Thornton1,7* 1Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States; 2Department of Biology, New York University, New York, United States; 3Committee on Higher Degrees in Biophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States; 4Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States; 5Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States; 6Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States; 7Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States Abstract The ancient mechanisms that caused developmental gene regulatory networks to diversify among distantly related taxa are not well understood. Here we use ancestral protein reconstruction, biochemical experiments, and developmental assays of transgenic animals carrying *For correspondence:
[email protected] (SS); reconstructed ancestral genes to investigate how the transcription factor Bicoid (Bcd) evolved its
[email protected] (JWT) central role in anterior-posterior patterning in flies. We show that most of Bcd’s derived functions are attributable to evolutionary changes within its homeodomain (HD) during a phylogenetic †These authors contributed interval >140 million years ago. A single substitution from this period (Q50K) accounts almost equally to this work entirely for the evolution of Bcd’s derived DNA specificity in vitro. In transgenic embryos Present address: ‡Biology expressing the reconstructed ancestral HD, however, Q50K confers activation of only a few of Department, Hamilton College, Bcd’s transcriptional targets and yields a very partial rescue of anterior development.