Altering the temporal regulation of one transcription factor drives sensory trade-offs

SUMMARY Size trade-offs of visual versus olfactory organs is a pervasive feature of animal evolution. Comparing Drosophila species, we find that larger eyes correlate with smaller antennae, where olfactory organs reside, and narrower faces. We demonstrate that this tradeoff arises through differential subdivision of the head primordium into visual versus non-visual fields. Specification of the visual field requires a highly-conserved eye development gene called eyeless in flies and Pax6 in humans. We discover that changes in the temporal regulation of eyeless expression during development is a conserved mechanism for sensory trade-offs within and between Drosophila species. We identify a natural single nucleotide polymorphism in the cis-regulatory region of eyeless that is sufficient to alter its temporal regulation and eye size. Because Pax6 is a conserved regulator of sensory placode subdivision, we propose that alterations in the mutual repression between sensory territories is a conserved mechanism for sensory trade-offs in animals.