Turning an Eye Blind

[stoutfellow]

Courtesy of threeringedmoon, an article by PZ Myers on How the Cavefish Lost Its Eyes. (For the record, I always assumed explanation #1 was the correct one.)

Comments

[toraks.livejournal.com]

He does a good job explaining!

Hedgehog

[(Anonymous)]

Fascinating article, but sometimes hedgehog is a protein, sometimes it is a gene. I'm totally confused.

Re: Hedgehog

[toraks.livejournal.com]

That's the way it works, typically the gene gets named something and you call the protein that is made by the gene by the same name.

Typically, when working with Drosophila melanogaster (aka fruit flies, see icon!), we distinguish the gene and the proten by the way they're written. Thus hedgehog is the gene -- the word is lowercase (typically) and italicized -- the fact that it is italicized and that indicates the gene is pretty standard in the fly community and publications. If we wanted to indicate the protein, we'd write Hedgehog or HEDGEHOG. Notice, it's not italicized and it's capitalized, either just the first letter or the whole word, and again, that's standard. However, when writing about a gene a lot, you'd use the word lots, so you use an abbreviation. For hedgehog, the abbreviation is hh -- hh for the gene and Hh or HH for the protein.

In the case of the referenced article, the guy is quite sloppy. I'm pretty sure the rest of the literature does abide by the same nomenclature rules for distinguishing gene names from proteins, but I'm not absolutely sure, which is why I've kept it to the fly field that I'm most familiar with. So anyway, even though the guy's talking about fish, he should do what I said above to keep the two apart and he hasn't. So I can imagine why you're confused! In essence though, it doesn't matter that much. The gene does nothing but have the sequence that can make the protein. And the protein actually functions to do things (in this case, signalling to other proteins).