Limbs From Fins
Fish have the genetic machinery necessary to make fingers, but it is not switched on, a study suggests.
The research in Plos Biology journal sheds light on how fish evolved into the earliest land animals millions of years ago.
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For fish to make the transition to land, an existing DNA architecture had to be "hijacked" in order to make digits, the researchers said.
In order to do this, they took genes from fish and inserted them into mice.
It was already known that the genes for limbs are found in fish but how they evolved to form digits remained unclear.
To unravel the genetics, the authors used the zebrafish as a model. But other scientists said that zebrafish were not a useful species for studying limb evolution.