Luke R Arnce

The paper investigates the conservation of essential germline stem cell genes across Drosophila species, finding that the function of bam is conserved in D. americana but not in D. teissieri, and that ~8% of GSC genes show absence across species.

The paper compares the structural evolution of Bam and Bgcn proteins across Drosophila species, finding little structural divergence despite sequence differences and suggesting functional divergence may be due to compensatory changes.