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when it comes to colorful colors, birds are clearly among the best in nature. Many colorful birds get pigment from food, but parrots don't. Now, researchers have reported a study of tiger-skin parrots, citing new evidence to explain how the birds produce their distinctive yellow, blue and green feathers. The study, published recently in
the Journal of Technology, is expected to add an important dimension to the evolution of parrots, the researchers said.
"s artificial selection over the past 150 years has resulted in a large number of simple Mendel genetics affecting color, so tiger-skin parrots are an excellent model animal for studying parrot colors. Thomas Cooke, lead author of the paper and a graduate student at Stanford University in the United States, said, "This time, we identified an atypical high-expression gene in the growing feathers of tiger-skin parrots that produces the yellow pigment in parrots."
previous studies have shown that tiger-skin parrots have a type of pigment that is not found in other vertebrates that appears to be red to yellow - psittacofulvins. Moreover, it has been found that the feathers of some long-tailed parrots that do not produce yellow are also changed from yellow to green to blue. However, the genes and bio-chemical pathways involved in the color of parrot feathers have not been known.
the new study, the team used a genome-wide association map to identify a genetic region containing blue mutations that was rich in several genes, but was not sure which genes played a major role. To narrow it down, the researchers sequenced the DNA of 234 live tiger-skin parrots (105 of which were blue) and 15 museum parrot specimens in Australia. They point out that the blue parrot carries the single mutant gene MuPKS, which encodes a little-known polykone synthase. Moreover, experiments showed that MuPKS had a high amount of expression on the feathers of the green parrot, but a single amino acid of MuPKS in the feathers of the blue parrot was replaced.
, the researchers cloned the MuPKS gene and inserted it into the yeast genome to see if yeast produced yellow pigments. The result was as expected. These experiments have shown that gene expression patterns give parrots a transformed plume. (Source: Science Network Tang 1 Dust)
