Extraordinary conservation of entire chromosomes in insects over long evolutionary periods

Abstract

Comparison of the genomes of different Drosophila species has shown that six different chromosomes, the so-called ''Muller elements," constitute the building blocks for all Drosophila species. Here, we confirm previous results suggesting that this conservation of the Muller elements extends far beyond Drosophila, to at least tephritid fruit flies, thought to have diverged from drosophilids 60-70 mYr ago. Less than 10 percent of genes differ in chromosome location between the two insect groups. Within chromosomes, however, the order is highly scrambled, as expected from the comparison between Drosophila species. The data also support the notion that the sex chromosomes of tephritid flies originated from an ancestor of the dot chromosome 4 of Drosophila. Overall, therefore, no new chromosome has been created for perhaps a billion generations over the two evolutionary lines. This stability at the chromosome level, which appears to extend to all Diptera including mosquitoes, is in stark contrast to other groups such as mammals, birds, fish and plants, in which chromosome numbers and organization vary enormously among species that have diverged over much fewer generations.