Hoxful Monsters

Genetics is a discipline initially worked out by Gregor Mendel (Austrian monk) using common pea plants in his garden.Since then many great minds used genetics to understand important problems of biology, including the study of evolution and how plants and animals develop. The power of genetics and its importance to mankind was first time recognized by the award of Nobel prize in Physiology or medicine in 1933 to T.H.Morgan . The role of his students, especially A.H.Sturtevant, C.B. Bridges and H.J.Muller was immense in making Drosophila, a powerful model system …

Homology mean any similarity between characters that is due to their shared ancestry.The term homologs looks simple theoretically but it’s important to get the various terms clear as it is one of the most important concept in biology.
Homologous features (”character”)–whether they be genes, mechanisms or morphologies–share an evolutionary history. That is,homologs share a character, from which they were derived, in an ancestor.The way the character looks (its “state”) is “primitive” if it looks like the ancestral character, and “derived” if it has changed from the ancestral state.
Orthologs and paralogs …

Homeotic genes/ Hox genes encode transcription factors, which play an important role in giving a unique identity to each segment and thereby setting up morphogenesis along the anterior posterior axis.They are recognizable by the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain,but all homeo domain containing proteins are not hox genes.Hox genes exhibit some important properties like
1) Found in clusters: Hox genes are physically linked on the chromosome.Eight genes are organized in one cluster in flies(Drosophila) and four clusters harboring 39 hox genes …