In 2006, just a few years after the fruit fly genome had been sequenced, geneticists at the University of California, Davis, made a startling discovery: Several new genes had cropped up, seemingly out of nowhere.
These “de novo genes” weren’t simply new variants of existing ones; they had sprung forth from the supposedly inert spaces in between the coding sections of DNA—regions long dismissed as the junkyards of the double helix. Since the days of Darwin, such sprightly biological change agents had never before been seen.
A young graduate student at the time, Li Zhao was so intrigued that upon graduating in 2011, she set out to join the lab of David Begun, where the discovery was first made. She soon revealed that these little genetic big bangs happen all the time—over the past decade, she and her team have identified more than 500 de novo genes in the Drosophila lineage alone.
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