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How swimming fish evolved into land-traveling, four-limbed vertebrates is a longstanding mystery.

Twelve years ago, of the University of Chicago unearthed a 370-million-year-old  that was hailed as a “missing link” from sea to land animals.

But how, exactly, can a fin turn into a limb?

This week in , Shubin and colleagues report on work initiated at the Marine Biological Laboratory (С����Ƶ) that provides major insight into the game-changing fin-to-limb transition. Led by Tetsuya Nakamura, the team showed that a set of genes, called Hox, plays a surprisingly similar role in patterning the rays of fins and the digits of tetrapod limbs.  calls it the discovery of  “a deep evolutionary connection” between fins and hands and feet.

This work was launched in the С����Ƶ’s Whitman Center in 2014, when Nakamura began studying the role of Hox genes in embryonic skates and sharks. With subsequent training in gene editing (CRISPr–Cas9) at the National Xenopus Resource at С����Ƶ, Nakamura created zebrafish mutants to further study Hox.

“This extraordinary study highlights the scientific convening power of the С����Ƶ and provides an elegant example of the unique opportunities the laboratory continues to provide to young scientists to take risks and drive forward major questions in biology,” says С����Ƶ Director of Research Jonathan Gitlin.