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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		What can bat wings tell us about the formation of our limbs?
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:01
	Publish Date:		2016-05-15 00:00:00
	Description:		What can the development of bat wings tell us about the structure of own limbs? According to researcher Nadav Ahituv of the University of California, San Francisco, the genetic expression behind bat wing formation may help explain limb development that has gone awry in mammals like ourselves. "What we do see is that a lot of…the same genes and the same pathways are used. There are no humans with wings or so forth, but there are a lot of humans that have longer fingers and also webbing. And so by understanding how this happens in bats, we can go back to the human patients and try to understand how that happens in the human patients." To observe this process of wing formation, Ahituv looked at gene expression during three stages of embryonic development in the Natal long-fingered bat. "We figured out all the genes that are expressed in the forelimb, and all the genes that are expressed in the hind limb, at these three different stages, and then basically compared them to see what was different in terms of the genes."
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