《科学英语：人类的色觉系统进化史.docxVIP

Many genetic1 mutations in visual pigments2, spread over millions of years, were required for humans to evolve from a primitive3 mammal with a dim, shadowy view of the world into a greater ape able to see all the colors in a rainbow. Now, after more than two decades of painstaking4 research, scientists have finished a detailed5 and complete picture of the evolution of human color vision. PLOS Genetics published the final pieces of this picture: The process for how humans switched from ultraviolet (UV) vision to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light.We have now traced all of the evolutionary6 pathways, going back 90 million years, that led to human color vision, says lead author Shozo Yokoyama, a biologist at Emory University. Weve clarified these molecular7 pathways at the chemical level, the genetic level and the functional8 level.Co-authors of the PLOS Genetics paper include Emory biologists Jinyi Xing, Yang Liu and DavideFaggionato; Syracuse University biologist William Starmer; and AhmetAltun, a chemist and former post-doc at Emory who is now at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey.Yokoyama and various collaborators over the years have teased out secrets of the adaptive evolution of vision in humans and other vertebrates by studying ancestral molecules9. The lengthy10 process involves first estimating and synthesizing ancestral proteins and pigments of a species, then conducting experiments on them. The technique combines microbiology with theoretical computation, biophysics, quantum chemistry and genetic engineering.Five classes of opsin genes11 encode visual pigments for dim-light and color vision. Bits and pieces of the opsin genes change and vision adapts as the environment of a species changes.Around 90 million years ago, our primitive mammalian ancestors were nocturnal and had UV-sensitive and red-sensitive color, giving them a bi-chromatic view of the world. By around 30 million years ago, our ancestors had evolved four classes of opsin genes, g