(Phys.org)—Indiana University biologists Teiya Kijimoto, Justen
Andrews and Armin Moczek say it's time to chalk another one up
for doublesex, the master regulatory gene at the terminus of the
sex determination pathway that imposes female and male sexual
development in fruit flies, honey bees, silk moths and wasps. In
new research just published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences that investigates the structure, expression
and function of the doublesex, or dsx, gene in horned beetles,
the team significantly expands on what scientists know about the
range of developmental and evolutionary changes mediated by this
gene. In horned beetles, horn development is typically
restricted to males, which use horns as weapons in combat for
females, which lack horns. Moczek and colleagues found that dsx
regulates the sex-specific expression of horns, promoting it in
males but inhibiting it in females. Things got more complicated,
however, in a subset of species in which males come in two
versions: Well-f