A study led by developmental biology professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Kingsley is one of several evolution-related discoveries lauded by the journal Science as the Breakthrough of the Year. Kingsley studies stickleback, which have evolved a broad range of appearance characteristics since they dispersed at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago (Farm Report, March/April 2003).
In the March 25, 2005, issue of Science, Kingsley and colleagues reported that 15 isolated freshwater stickleback populations lost all their bony armor through mutations in the same gene—one of the first times researchers have shown that the same genetic change was responsible for an evolutionary adaptation in disparate populations.
