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Cnidarians have become valuable models for understanding many aspects of developmental biology including the evolution of body plan diversity, novel cell type specification, and regeneration. Most of our under...
Homology, or relationship among characters by common descent, has been notoriously difficult to assess for many morphological features, and cell types in particular. The ontogenetic origin of morphological tra...
Ixodes ticks are the most important vectors of arthropod-borne diseases in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Ixodes scapularis is the major vector that transmits the causative agent of Lyme disease in the ea...
The evolution of limb morphology plays an important role in animal adaptation to different ecological niches. To fully adapt to aquatic life, cetaceans underwent hindlimb degeneration and forelimb transformed ...
Relatively little is known about the diversity of embryonic development across lineages of spiders, even though the study of embryonic development is a primary step in evo-devo studies and essential for unders...
How animal cell types, tissues, and regional body plans arose is a fundamental question in EvoDevo. Many current efforts attempt to link genetic information to the morphology of cells, tissues and regionalizat...
Batoids possess a unique body plan associated with a benthic lifestyle that includes dorsoventral compression and anteriorly expanded pectoral fins that fuse to the rostrum. The family Myliobatidae, including ...
Fruits, with their diverse shapes, colors, and flavors, represent a fascinating aspect of plant evolution and have played a significant role in human history and nutrition. Understanding the origins and evolut...
Panarthropods, a major group of invertebrate animals comprised of arthropods, onychophorans, and tardigrades, are the only limb-bearing members of Ecdysozoa. The complexity and versatility of panarthropod pair...
Early embryogenesis is characterized by dramatic cell proliferation and movement. In most insects, early embryogenesis includes a phase called the uniform blastoderm, during which cells evenly cover the entire...
Previous studies have reported that periderm (the outer ectodermal layer) in zebrafish partially expands into the mouth and pharyngeal pouches, but does not reach the medial endoderm, where the pharyngeal teet...
Hox genes are transcriptional regulators that elicit cell positional identity along the anterior–posterior region of the body plan across different lineages of Metazoan. Comparison of Hox gene expression acros...
Spiders evolved different types of eyes, a pair of primary eyes that are usually forward pointing, and three pairs of secondary eyes that are typically situated more posterior and lateral on the spider’s head....
Thyroid hormones are crucial regulators of metamorphosis and development in bilaterians, particularly in chordate deuterostomes. Recent evidence suggests a role for thyroid hormone signaling, principally via 3...
The acquisition of air-breathing organs is one of the key innovations for terrestrialization in animals. Terrestrial isopods, a crustacean lineage, can be interesting models to study the evolution of respirato...
Studies of morphology and developmental patterning in adult stages of many invertebrates are hindered by opaque structures, such as shells, skeletal elements, and pigment granules that block or refract light a...
This study sheds light on the genetic blueprints of chaetogenesis (bristle formation), a complex biomineralization process essential not only for the diverse group of bristle worms (annelids) but also for othe...
The modification of fertile stamens into sterile staminodes has occurred independently many times in the flowering plant lineage. In the genus Aquilegia (columbine) and its closest relatives, the two stamen whorl...
Spiders are a diverse order of chelicerates that diverged from other arthropods over 500 million years ago. Research on spider embryogenesis, particularly studies using the common house spider Parasteatoda tepida...
Nutrient availability is among the most widespread means by which environmental variability affects developmental outcomes. Because almost all cells within an individual organism share the same genome, structu...
A challenge for evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology is to expand the breadth of research organisms used to investigate how animal diversity has evolved through changes in embryonic development. New e...
The hyolaryngeal apparatus generates biosonar pulses in the laryngeally echolocating bats. The cartilage and muscles comprising the hyolarynx of laryngeally echolocating bats are morphologically modified compa...
The Middle Cambrian fossil Pikaia has a regular series of vertical bands that, assuming chordate affinities, can be interpreted as septa positioned between serial myotomes. Whether Pikaia has a notochord and nerv...
Cadherins are calcium-dependent transmembrane cell–cell adhesion proteins that are essential for metazoan development. They consist of three subfamilies: classical cadherins, which bind catenin, protocadherins...
Opsins are the primary proteins responsible for light detection in animals. Cnidarians (jellyfish, sea anemones, corals) have diverse visual systems that have evolved in parallel with bilaterians (squid, flies...
The second annual Cnidarian Model Systems Meeting, aka “Cnidofest”, took place in Davis, California from 7 to 10th of September, 2022. The meeting brought together scientists using cnidarians to study molecula...
In social insects, interactions among colony members trigger caste differentiation with morphological modifications. In termite caste differentiation, caste-specific morphologies (such as mandibles in soldiers...
The Tunicata or Urochordata is the only animal group with the ability to synthesize cellulose directly and cellulose is a component of the tunic that covers the entire tunicate body. The genome of Ciona intestina...
The developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs) of two sea urchin species, Lytechinus variegatus (Lv) and Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (Sp), have remained remarkably similar despite about 50 million years sin...
Transcriptomic methods can be used to elucidate genes and pathways responsible for phenotypic differences between populations. Asellus aquaticus is a freshwater isopod crustacean with surface- and cave-dwelling e...
The vertebrate head skeleton has evolved a myriad of forms since their divergence from invertebrate chordates. The connection between novel gene expression and cell types is therefore of importance in this pro...
In the course of animal developmental processes, various tissues are differentiated through complex interactions within the gene regulatory network. As a general concept, differentiation has been considered to...
Schizocardium karankawa sp. nov. has been collected from subtidal muds of the Laguna Madre, Texas, and the Mississippi coast, Gulf of Mexico. The Texas population is reproductive from early February to mid-April....
The polyplacophoran mollusks (chitons) possess serially arranged shell plates. This feature is unique among mollusks and believed to be essential to explore the evolution of mollusks as well as their shells. P...
Phenotypic evolution is mainly explained by selection for phenotypic variation arising from factors including mutation and environmental noise. Recent theoretical and experimental studies have suggested that p...
Plant domestication is a remarkable example of rapid phenotypic transformation of polygenic traits, such as organ size. Evidence from a handful of study cases suggests this transformation is due to gene regula...
In Metazoa, the germline represents the cell lineage devoted to the transmission of genetic heredity across generations. Its functions intuitively evoke the crucial roles that it plays in organism development ...
Cichlid fishes are a very diverse and species-rich family of teleost fishes that inhabit lakes and rivers of India, Africa, and South and Central America. Research has largely focused on East African cichlids ...
Pseudanthia are multiflowered units that resemble single flowers, frequently by association with pseudocorollas formed by enlarged peripheral florets (ray flowers). Such resemblance is not only superficial, be...
In Dictyostelium discoideum (Ddis), adenylate cyclase A (ACA) critically generates the cAMP oscillations that coordinate aggregation and morphogenesis. Unlike group 4 species like Ddis, other groups do not use ex...
Brachiopods and molluscs are lophotrochozoans with hard external shells which are often believed to have evolved convergently. While palaeontological data indicate that both groups are descended from biominera...
Water fleas of the genus Daphnia have been a model system for hundreds of years and is among the best studied ecological model organisms to date. Daphnia are planktonic crustaceans with a cyclic parthenogenetic l...
Hox genes are key regulators of appendage development in the insect body plan. The body plan of mayfly (Ephemeroptera) nymphs differs due to the presence of abdominal appendages called gills. Despite mayflies’...
The red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum has emerged as an important insect model system for a variety of topics. With respect to studying gene function, it is second only to the vinegar fly D. melanogaster. The ...
There are a wide range of developmental strategies in animal phyla, but most insights into adult body plan formation come from direct-developing species. For indirect-developing species, there are distinct lar...
Two genes, Distal-less (Dll) and spalt (sal), are known to be involved in establishing nymphalid butterfly wing patterns. They function in several ways: in the differentiation of the eyespot’s central signalling ...
Phloem wedges furrowing the wood are one of the most notorious, widespread types of cambial variants in Angiosperms. Many lianas in Malpighiaceae show these variations in the arrangement of the secondary tissu...
Gnetales have a key phylogenetic position in the evolution of seed plants. Among the Gnetales, there is an extraordinary morphological diversity of seeds, the genus Ephedra, in particular, exhibits fleshy, coriac...
The Gymnotiformes, also known as the South American or Neotropical knifefishes, include the strongly electric Electrophorus electricus and many other weakly electric species. These fish possess specialised electr...
Fossils constitute the principal repository of data that allow for independent tests of hypotheses of biological evolution derived from observations of the extant biota. Traditionally, transformational series ...
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