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Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on June 22, 2007
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2007 47(5):759-769; doi:10.1093/icb/icm050
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Key transitions during the evolution of animal phototransduction: novelty, "tree-thinking," co-option, and co-duplication

David C. Plachetzki1 and Todd H. Oakley
Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. The University of California-Santa Barbara, CA 93106

Correspondence: 1E-mail: plachetzki{at}lifesci.ucsb.edu

Biologists are amazed by the intricacy and complexity of biological interactions between molecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Yet underlying all this biodiversity is a universal common ancestry. How does evolution proceed from common starting points to generate the riotous biodiversity we see today? This "novelty problem"—understanding how novelty and common ancestry relate—has become of critical importance, especially since the realization that genes and developmental processes are often conserved across vast phylogenetic distances. In particular, two processes have emerged as the primary generators of diversity in organismal form: duplication plus divergence and co-option. In this article, we first illustrate how phylogenetic methodology and "tree-thinking" can be used to distinguish duplication plus divergence from co-option. Second, we review two case studies in photoreceptor evolution—one suggesting a role for duplication plus divergence, the other exemplifying how co-option can shape evolutionary change. Finally, we discuss how our tree-thinking approach differs from other treatments of the origin of novelty that utilized a "linear-thinking" approach in which evolution is viewed as a linear and gradual progression, often from simple to complex phenotype, driven by natural selection.

From the symposium "Key Transitions in Animal Evolution" presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Integration and Comparitive Biology, January 3–7, 2007, at Phoenix, Arizona.


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