Variation in circadian clock protein in fruit flies discovered

Circadian Rhythms have been shown to exist in both plants and animals.  They run our schedule of when to go to bed and when to wake up.  A minor alteration to our "clock" would have a major impact to our everyday lives.

The scientists in my article have found a new variation in a few fruit flies genes.  This variation was way more abundant then they believed, with the original version only barely being more populous than the majority.  This change was caused by an adaptation in the protein called Cryptochrome (a blue-light photoreceptor) and has led to the fruit fly not only altering their activity pattern, but also their behavior.

The scientists observed both regular fruit flies and the newer fruit flies for a little over a year (about 20 fruit fly generations).  They tried to simulate the fly's wild environment while recording their behavior.  This evolutionary variation was shown to help the fruit fly in significant ways, which led to the gene being actively maintained and passed down successfully from fruit fly to fruit fly.  And who knows, we may see different variations like this in the future!

My article was done by a research team at the University of Leicester.  It was published to ScienceDaily on January 25th, 2014.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140125172346.htm

NOS Themes:

1.  Science is collaborative:  This research was done by an entire team of researchers and given grants from two separate councils.

2.  Science is based on evidence:  The researchers found and identified the exact variation in the gene and have observed alternate behavior and daily cycles to back this up.

3.  Importance of repeatability:  With an abundance of time and a substantial amount of time anybody could effectively repeat the experiment, as nothing crazy besides observation was done.