Scientists continue to play the Creator. In pursuit of creative achievements of evolution, genetics, it seems, was able to reproduce the first step, which made vertebrates from the sea on dry land.

In order to achieve the desired effect, Jose Gomez-Skarmeta and his colleagues from Seville University Pablo de Olavide decided to change the behavior of the gene Hoxd13: it is known that the embryos of fish, its activity is extremely low, and four-legged, on the contrary, high. The experimenters put the future of fish-Zebra (Danio rerio) into the genome of a second copy Hoxd13 and see what happens.

These embryos instead of the normal fan-shaped fins were formed round, not flat limbs. Inside the soft tissues appeared procurement of cartilage and bone, uncharacteristically for fish. This design is already quite resembled the legs of the animal, and, apparently, something like this and was launched hundreds of millions of years ago, the program of transformation of fish to amphibians.

This assumption was confirmed after insertion into the genome of the unfortunate fish-Zebra missing in him gene CsС that controls Hoxd13 in the Bud mouse that led to the transformation of the fins already in a primitive analogue paws.

"We found that the "control programme" from genome mice were able to start work Hoxd13 in the tips of the fins of the fish-Zebra. This suggests that the cellular mechanisms that can enable the software that was present in the genome of the common ancestor of fish and four-footed animals," says one of the authors of the study Fernando Casares.

Presumably, one day, moving in this direction, genetics will narovchata to juggle genes that from a germ fish-Zebra they will outgrow the real striped hoofed.