FLICKR, NICHDA laboratory experiment simulating the harvesting that takes place in commercial fisheries—essentially, taking out fish of a certain size—resulted in widespread genetic changes to the population.
During each generation of a zebrafish colony, University of Turku postdoc Silva Uusi-Heikkilä and her colleagues removed the largest 75 percent of the population. After just five generations, the researchers allowed the population to recover, then measured levels of gene expression in the animals. They found significant differences in the activity of thousands of genes.
“Removing the largest individuals from the experimentally exploited populations induced differences in the expression of more than 4,000 genes after five generations of size-selective harvesting,” Uusi-Heikkilä said in an Academy of Finland press release. “We also demonstrate significant allele frequency changes in genes that were differentially expressed,” she and her coauthors added in their report, published last week (May 13) in Molecular Ecology.
Overall, the changes in gene expression patterns ...
