United Press International – February 29, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 29, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) — A research team in Sweden said Charles Darwin was wrong about the genetic basis for the yellow skin of some chickens.
Greger Larson, a research fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden and at Durham University in Britain, said yellow-skinned chickens have a different version of a gene than their white-skinned cousins.
Darwin believed that all chickens came from a wild species known as the red junglefowl but when the research team looked for a yellow-skin gene in the red junglefowl they found only the genetic variant that codes for white skin. The yellow-skin version of the gene, however, was present in grey junglefowl, the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Genetics said Friday in a release.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International