Greenwold, graduate student Weier Bao and Sawyer analyzed the avian genomes and published an accompanying paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology that shows correlations between the number of beta -
keratin gene copies and the birds» lifestyles.
The unifying theme, though, is the abundance of feather beta -
keratin genes, which make up more than 50 percent of the
copies of the several beta -
keratin subtypes in all the birds studied.