That's Not Plastic Surgery, That's Genetic Variation

PZ Myers goes to great length on his blog at Pharyngula to explain a paper recently published by one of GT’s rising young investigators from last year, John Fondon. The paper examines how tandem repeats within the genome can affect morphology in domestic dogs. In particular, Fondon looked at 142 dogs from 92 different breeds; of the 37 different tandem repeats in 17 genes in each, they found 15 of the 17 genes had multiple alleles varying in the length of their repeats. Gene expression variation in two genes, Runx-2 and Alx-4, were correlated with craniofacial variation.