Hooray for us mammals: we evolve, adapt and we’re backwards compatible.

UCSB researcher Gerald Jacobs from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Research Institute and Dr. Jeremy Nathans, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, have found that by splicing a gene for human color vision into mice, the altered mice are able to detect colors they never would have been able to before. Their findings were published in the March 23 issue of the journal Science.

It goes like this: mice, along with many other mammals, have color perception limited to light of short- and medium wavelengths, perhaps somewhat similar to people with red-green color blindness.

Most primates on the other hand, including humans, have a third set of photoreceptors that make them sensitive to longer wavelengths. This allows us to see greens, yellows and reds, and it has been speculated that this capacity may have first evolved to permit our primate ancestors to be able to distinguish ripe fruits vs. green, unripe ones.

By adding another set of photoreceptors to the mice’s visual repertoire, the rodents were able to see new colors.

“What we are looking at in these mice is the same evolutionary event that happened in one of the distant ancestors of all primates, and that led ultimately to the trichromatic color vision that we now enjoy,” Nathans said.

According to the scientists, who also include UCSB researcher Gary Williams and Johns Hopkins researcher Hugh Cahill, their findings have implications not just for the evolution of color vision but for the evolution of sensory systems in general.

“This enabled us to see how it is in our ancient past that we added this dimension of vision,” said Jacobs.

Before you go hoping to give your future offspring the night vision of cats, or the heightened sense of smell of dogs, or even mixing and matching your pets, however, remember that it’s still not wise to fool with Mother Nature.

“We don’t know if this added color vision would prove beneficial for the mice as it has for primates,” Jacobs said.

What the study does prove, he said, is that the mammalian nervous system is sufficiently plastic that it can accommodate changes in sensory receptors and from these alone yield new dimensions of visual experience.