The new study, done in collaboration with scientists at Eawag Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Sciences and Georgia Institute of Technology, in addition to more than 70 scientists from the international cichlid research community, appears in the September 3 advance online edition of Nature.
“Our study reveals a spectrum of methods that nature uses to allow organisms to adapt to different environments,” said co-senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, Co-Director of SciLifeLab, scientific director of vertebrate genome biology at the Broad Institute and professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University “These mechanisms are likely also at work in humans and other vertebrates, and by focusing on the remarkably diverse cichlid fishes, we were able to study this process on a broad scale for the first time.”