Consider the rapid evolution of the armor-plated threespine stickleback, a curious little fish that Stanford biologist David M. Kingsley is setting out to study once more in its local home patch just below the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River near Fresno. Kingsley and his team of graduate students and lab colleagues will haul their traps to the river Monday and don their hip waders for another round of collecting in a path-breaking research project that is revealing how evolution can rapidly alter the structure of living organisms -- even one gene at a time. Kingsley is a developmental biologist and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford’s medical school, and he and his colleagues are publishing a major report on their latest discovery in stickleback genetics today in the journal Science. But they’re already set to move on, seeking still more discoveries.
