Date: June 6, 2018
Source: American Ornithological Society Publications
Office
The North American woodpeckers
known as "flickers" stand out for their distinctive wing and tail
feathers of bright reds or yellows, and for their rampant interbreeding where
these birds of different colors meet in the Great Plains. Despite the obvious
visual differences between the Red-shafted Flicker of the west and the Yellow-shafted
Flicker of the east, scientists have never before found genetic differences
between them. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances uses
data from thousands of regions across the genome to distinguish these birds
molecularly for the first time.
Stepfanie Aguillon and her
colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explored patterns across the
genomes of these birds and find them to be incredibly similar at the molecular
level. In spite of the strong similarity, they still have the ability to
distinguish the western Red-shafted Flickers from the eastern Yellow-shafted
Flickers for the first time through the use of new genomic methods. Genomic
technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that genetic sequence differences
that were undetectable in the 1980s using (then) cutting-edge methods are now
readily apparent using next-generation sequencing techniques.
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