The Genetic Basis of Tail-Loss Evolution in Humans and Apes
upstart writes:
The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes:
Why do all the other animals have tails, but not me? [...] The loss of tails has long been thought to have played a key role in bipedalism in humans.
This curiosity-based question was addressed by using bioinformatics tools to look at differences between the genomes of humans (and the other apes, which all lack tails) and monkeys (which all have tails, like most other mammals).
Bo Xia, a Ph.D. candidate studying this problem in the labs of Jef Boeke and Itai Yanai, looked at sequence alignments of all genes known to be involved in tail development and discovered a movable piece of DNA called a retrotransposon inserted in the TBXT gene, which is a developmental regulator crucial for tail development. The reason it had not been spotted before was due its placement in noncoding (intron) DNA, where most people would not look for mutations.
Having a tail would likely make it difficult to sit down. What practical applications would there be if we did have a tail?
Journal Reference:
Bo Xia, Weimin Zhang, Aleksandra Wudzinska, et al. The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2021.09.14.460388)
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