A battle between the sexes in a single gene

Enlarge / This female fruit fly wants Apollo out of her ovaries. (credit: Katja Schulz)

Evolution is great at driving changes when a species has specific needs. But what happens when different members of the same species need different things?

If those different groups are just different populations, that’s a recipe for a split into two new species. But in many cases, the issue comes about because males and females have different needs. That makes speciation a lousy solution (unless you can get rid of the males). What you end up with is a battle between the sexes that plays out in their genes, as changes that are good for females are balanced against the harm they do to males and vice versa. Now, researchers have identified one of these cases in fruit flies, and they figured out how the battle was resolved so that everyone mostly wins.

The Greek gods of fruit flies

In this case, the site of the battle is a small chunk of the genome that contains two genes: Apollo and Artemis. The genes aren’t just close to each other—they’re closely related as well. Approximately 200,000 years ago, a single ancestral gene was duplicated to produce these two. Closely related species of Drosophila only have a single copy of this gene.

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