Controls for animals' color designs revealed

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/04/07/controls_for_animals_color_designs_revealed.html

The vivid colors and designs animals use to interact with their environments have awed and inspired since before people learned to draw on the cave wall.

This article is somewhat interesting, telling about how scientists figured out how the fruit fly makes spots on it's wings and has figured out how to change the colors and change the spots to stripes. "We can make custom flies," notes Carroll. By manipulating the gene, "we can make striped flies out of spotted flies." they also make the claim that they assume this should translate to other species, though it doesn't look like they have yet.
i understand this is another example of the amazing things that we can do with gene manipulation, and i guess things like color and pattern are the easiest. it's like we're in the kindergarden of gene manipulation, first we work on fingerpainting and over the next few grades we'll eventually be working on more important things. hopefully the pythagorean theorem of gene manipulation will allow people to weed out genetic alterations altogether.