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The presence of a dedicated germline, a population of cells that give rise exclusively to gametes, is a unique feature of animal development. Despite variation in the timing of germ cell determination (1, 2) and in the details of lineage and migration by which they populate the gonad, numerous germline genes are conserved across the bilaterian phyla. It is therefore likely that biologists of today are studying variations on a theme first played by a common ancestor of the protostomes and deuterostomes, roughly 600 million years ago (3). In this issue of PNAS , Xu et al. (4) provide further support for deep conservation of germline function with their discovery in mammals of a homologue of another invertebrate gene encoding the RNA-binding protein Boule (5, 6). For some time, however, researchers had believed that they already had the mammalian boule homologues in the Y-linked gene DAZ (deleted in Azoospermia), only in humans and old world monkeys (7–9), and its autosomal ancestor, DAZL (DAZ-like, also known as DAZH; refs. 10–12). The work of Xu et al. suggests that DAZL and DAZ are in fact the divergent products of two nested gene-duplication events, and that the slower evolving progenitor, BOULE, remains a distinct gene in mammals. A phylogenetic perspective reveals that each duplication event generated one paralog retaining the ancestral function and one that is divergent. The solitary DAZ relative in Drosophila, boule, is expressed only during and is required for male meiosis (5, 13), and the expression data of Xu et al. (4) are consistent with conservation of this role for mouse and human BOULE. Thus, it is likely that the ancestral Boule gene functioned only …

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