Shortly after joining the University of Georgia in 1975, I gave a departmental seminar describing work on protein variation in fish. Echoing a sentiment popular at the time, I concluded that regulatory rather than structural genes should be studied next, because changes in gene regulation were perhaps at the heart of adaptive evolution.
Restriction enzymes are chemicals that naturally cut DNA in certain places.
Knowledge of them was so new in 1975 that Avise had never even heard of them. He found one faculty member, Robert Lansman, who knew about restriction enzymes, but his work was not on regulatory genes. Instead, Lansman studied the DNA of mitochondria, tiny cell-bound packages that generate energy for the cells. By the late 1970s, the study of mtDNA was generating considerable excitement in laboratories around the world. Early on, Avise had the idea that mtDNA might be a wonderful tool for analyzing the evolution of certain vertebrates.