Americans created chickens with heads of dinosaurs

North American biologists formed the embryos of chickens from the jaws of dinosaurs, suppressing the development of beaks. In this way, the experts tried to understand the process of development of birds.

American biologists have turned out to form the embryos of chickens with heads of dinosaurs by shattering the formation of proteins, which enabled the birds the beak is created, Nature informs. But experts did not set before itself the intention to bring dinosaurs back to life with support for genetic engineering. They tried to understand how reptiles evolved into birds over 150 million years ago, but directly as animal faces eventually transformed into the beaks.

The development of birds was chaotic and hard to follow, exploring the remains of the first feathered animals. But researchers are installed, that the oldest dinosaurs originally there was 2 small bones under the sides of the muzzle, as well as in all other vertebrates, and then they merged into 1 and there was a beak.

A group of biologists, headed by Arhat Abzhanov of Harvard University and Bhart-Anjana, Bhullar from Chicago, studied the embryonic formation of the beak in chickens and ostriches and compared it with the formation of the muzzle in embryos alligators, lizards and turtles. Experts revealed that proteins FGF and Wnt responsible for the formation of the external skull animals, there are reptiles and birds in different ways. In lizards, crocodiles and turtles these proteins existed active 2 is not very large areas of the fruit, and chicken and ostrich - they worked in a larger spectrum in such a plot. In the present invention, the experts see preliminary evidence that a change in the activity of FGF and Wnt contributed to the evolution of the beak.

To control own guess, biologists have blocked the activity of proteins FGF and Wnt developing chick embryos. The report of the study did not allow researchers to wait for the birth of the obtained embryos mutants. Instead, scientists have tracked changes in their appearance in the final stages of formation, before the hatching of the eggs.

Some of the birds jawbone remained United, some have become separated and small. Numerical modification of skulls chickens mutants revealed that their vertebral bones are similar to cranial remains of perioptic and dinosaurs, rather than the remains of ordinary chickens.

Despite the significance of the discovery, the genetic mechanism of development of the beak can be much more difficult. Probably responsible for this, genes encoding FGF and Wnt, or genes specific biochemical interactions, or possibly the formation of head bones establishes the regulatory DNA that affects gene expression. The study of these elements would have been allowed to form from reptiles, birds and opposite.

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