The story of a butterfly that explains how species evolve.

People often wonder or rather doubt how new species are formed. Some people doubt the whole phenomenon of evolution because it's "a theory of evolution". However, in reality, evolution happens and we can find evidence of it in nature. Here, for instance, a species of butterfly in Amazon region was found to have evolved from the hybridization of two other species of butterflies. Interestingly, the descendants of all these three lineages of butterflies coexist in same geographical region and two of these occasionally mate with each other.

DNA repair is deleterious during mitotic phase

Cells have mechanisms to repair broken DNA molecules. The machinery to repair broken DNA, specifically, double stranded breaks (DSB), is shut down when the cells are dividing, i.e. when cells are in mitotic phase.

In a recently published paper by researchers from The Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and University of Toronto observed the effects of restoring the DSB repair machinery in mitotic cells. They found that restoration of this machinery was actually harmful and caused the ends of the chromosomes to fuse. This resulted in dicentric chromosomes and aneuploidy.


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