Vertebrates possess a diverse range of integumentary epithelial appendages, including scales, feathers and hair. These structures share extensive early developmental homology, as they mostly originate from a c...
Authors: Rory L. Cooper, Victoria J. Lloyd, Nicolas Di-Poï, Alexander G. Fletcher, Paul M. Barrett and Gareth J. Fraser
Melanic patterns such as horizontal stripes, vertical bars and spots are common among teleost fishes and often serve roles in camouflage or mimicry. Extensive research in the zebrafish model has shown that the...
Authors: Laura A. Hendrick, Grace A. Carter, Erin H. Hilbrands, Brian P. Heubel, Thomas F. Schilling and Pierre Le Pabic
The amniote jaw complex is a remarkable amalgamation of derivatives from distinct embryonic cell lineages. During development, the cells in these lineages experience concerted movements, migrations, and signal...
Authors: Katherine C. Woronowicz and Richard A. Schneider
Unravelling the genetic basis of polymorphic characters is central to our understanding of the origins and diversification of living organisms. Recently, supergenes have been implicated in a wide range of comp...
Authors: Suzanne V. Saenko, Mathieu Chouteau, Florence Piron-Prunier, Corinne Blugeon, Mathieu Joron and Violaine Llaurens
Many traits evolve by cis-regulatory modification, by which changes to noncoding sequences affect the binding affinity for available transcription factors and thus modify the expression profile of genes. Multiple...
Authors: Joseph J. Hanly, Richard W. R. Wallbank, W. Owen McMillan and Chris D. Jiggins
The evolution of the head was one of the key events that marked the transition from invertebrates to vertebrates. With the emergence of structures such as eyes and jaws, vertebrates evolved an active and preda...
Authors: Huijia Wang, Peter W. H. Holland and Tokiharu Takahashi
For more than a century, studies on tunicate muscle formation have revealed many principles of cell fate specification, gene regulation, morphogenesis, and evolution. Here, we review the key studies that have ...
Spiral cleavage is a conserved, early developmental mode found in several phyla of Lophotrochozoans resulting in highly diverse adult body plans. While the cleavage pattern has clearly been broadly conserved, ...
Authors: Johannes Girstmair and Maximilian J. Telford
Complete and perfect regeneration of appendages is a process that has fascinated and perplexed biologists for centuries. Some tetrapods possess amazing regenerative abilities, but the regenerative abilities of...
Authors: Bess M. Miller, Kimberly Johnson and Jessica L. Whited
Generally in termites, alates differentiate through multiple nymphal instars which gradually develop wing buds. However, in a dampwood termite, Hodotermopsis sjostedti, alates molt directly from a single nymphal ...
Authors: Ryotaro Nii, Kohei Oguchi, Junpei Shinji, Shigeyuki Koshikawa and Toru Miura
Understanding the evolution of novel features requires homology assessments at different levels of biological organization. In flowering plants, floral coronas that play various roles in plant–pollinator inter...
Authors: Jamie L. Kostyun, Josephine E. Robertson and Jill C. Preston
For echinoderms with feeding larvae, metamorphic and post-settlement success may be highly dependent on larval nutrition and the accumulation of energetic lipids from the diet. In contrast to the sea urchins, ...
Authors: Josefina Peters-Didier and Mary A. Sewell
In tunicates, the capacity to build an adult body via non-embryonic development (NED), i.e., asexual budding and whole body regeneration, has been gained or lost several times across the whole subphylum. A rec...
Authors: Marta Scelzo, Alexandre Alié, Sophie Pagnotta, Camille Lejeune, Pauline Henry, Laurent Gilletta, Laurel S. Hiebert, Francesco Mastrototaro and Stefano Tiozzo
The great capability of insects to adapt to new environments promoted their extraordinary diversification, resulting in the group of Metazoa with the largest number of species distributed worldwide. To underst...
Authors: Isabel Almudi, Carlos A. Martín-Blanco, Isabel M. García-Fernandez, Adrián López-Catalina, Kristofer Davie, Stein Aerts and Fernando Casares
The vast majority of nematode species have vermiform (worm-shaped) body plans throughout post-embryonic development. However, atypical body shapes have evolved multiple times. The plant-parasitic Tylenchomorph...
Authors: Sita Thapa, Michael K. Gates, Ursula Reuter-Carlson, Rebecca J. Androwski and Nathan E. Schroeder
Across metazoans, visual systems employ different types of photoreceptor neurons (PRs) to detect light. These include rhabdomeric PRs, which exist in distantly related phyla and possess an evolutionarily conse...
Authors: F. Javier Bernardo-Garcia, Maryam Syed, Gáspár Jékely and Simon G. Sprecher
In chordates, cardiac and body muscles arise from different embryonic origins. In addition, myogenesis can be triggered in adult organisms, during asexual development or regeneration. In non-vertebrate chordat...
Authors: Maria Mandela Prünster, Lorenzo Ricci, Federico D. Brown and Stefano Tiozzo
The sea urchin is a basal deuterostome that is more closely related to vertebrates than many organisms traditionally used to study neurogenesis. This phylogenetic position means that the sea urchin can provide...
Authors: Leslie A. Slota, Esther M. Miranda and David R. McClay
Hox genes encode a family of homeodomain containing transcription factors that are clustered together on chromosomes of many Bilateria. Some bilaterian lineages express these genes during embryogenesis in spatial...
Segmentation, the subdivision of the major body axis into repeated elements, is considered one of the major evolutionary innovations in bilaterian animals. In all three segmented animal clades, the predominant...
Authors: Renske M. A. Vroomans, Paulien Hogeweg and Kirsten H. W. J. ten Tusscher
Egg size represents an important form of maternal effect determined by a complex interplay of long-term adaptation and short-term plasticity balancing egg size with brood size. Haplochromine cichlids are mater...
Authors: Ehsan Pashay Ahi, Pooja Singh, Laurène Alicia Lecaudey, Wolfgang Gessl and Christian Sturmbauer
How genome complexity affects organismal phenotypic complexity is a fundamental question in evolutionary developmental biology. Previous studies proposed various contributing factors of genome complexity and t...
Authors: Dong Yang, Aishi Xu, Pan Shen, Chao Gao, Jiayin Zang, Chen Qiu, Hongsheng Ouyang, Ying Jiang and Fuchu He
Tapeworms are agents of neglected tropical diseases responsible for significant health problems and economic loss. They also exhibit adaptations to a parasitic lifestyle that confound comparisons of their deve...
Authors: Peter D. Olson, Magdalena Zarowiecki, Katherine James, Andrew Baillie, Georgie Bartl, Phil Burchell, Azita Chellappoo, Francesca Jarero, Li Ying Tan, Nancy Holroyd and Matt Berriman
Morphogen signalling represents a key mechanism of developmental processes during animal development. Previously, several evolutionary conserved morphogen signalling pathways have been identified, and their pl...
Authors: Mattias Hogvall, Graham E. Budd and Ralf Janssen
Both euarthropods and vertebrates have tripartite brains. Several orthologous genes are expressed in similar regionalized patterns during brain development in both vertebrates and euarthropods. These similarit...
Authors: Frank W. Smith, Mandy Cumming and Bob Goldstein
The larval nervous system of the solitary tunicate Ciona is a simple model for the study of chordate neurodevelopment. The development and connectivity of the Ciona motor ganglion have been studied in fine detail...
Understanding the evolution and development of morphological traits of the last common bilaterian ancestor is a major goal of the evo-devo discipline. The reconstruction of this “urbilaterian” is mainly based ...
Authors: Sandra Treffkorn, Laura Kahnke, Lars Hering and Georg Mayer
For early larvae of amphioxus, Kaji et al. (Zool Lett 2:2, 2016) proposed that mesoderm cells are added to the rim of the forming mouth, giving it the quality of a coelomoduct without homology to the oral opening...
Mammals (class Mammalia) have evolved diverse craniofacial morphology to adapt to a wide range of ecological niches. However, the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying the diversification of mammalia...
Wnt/β-catenin (or canonical) signalling pathway activity is necessary and used independently several times for specification of vegetal fate and endoderm, gut differentiation, maintenance of epithelium in adul...
Authors: Radim Žídek, Ondřej Machoň and Zbyněk Kozmik
In the last few years, accumulated information has indicated that the evolution of an extra-embryonic membrane in dipterans was accompanied by changes in the gene regulatory network controlled by the BMP/Dpp p...
Glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3) regulates many cell fate decisions in animal development. In multicellular structures of the group 4 dictyostelid Dictyostelium discoideum, GSK3 promotes spore over stalk-like di...
Authors: Yoshinori Kawabe, Takahiro Morio, Yoshimasa Tanaka and Pauline Schaap
The concerted activity of Meis and Hoxa11 transcription factors is essential for the subdivision of tetrapod limbs into proximo-distal (PD) domains; however, little is know about the evolution of this patterning ...
Authors: Fernanda Langellotto, Maria Fiorentino, Elena De Felice, Luigi Caputi, Valeria Nittoli, Jean M. P. Joss and Paolo Sordino
Although retinoic acid (RA) signaling plays a crucial role in the body patterning of chordates, its function in non-chordate invertebrates, other than its mediation of environmental cues triggering metamorphos...
Authors: Shumpei Yamakawa, Yoshiaki Morino, Masanao Honda and Hiroshi Wada
Sall (Spalt-like) proteins are zinc-finger transcription factors involved in a number of biological processes. They have only been studied in a few model organisms, such as Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis...
Authors: José Lorente-Sorolla, Marta Truchado-Garcia, Kimberly J. Perry, Jonathan Q. Henry and Cristina Grande
The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) family of transcription factors is one of the largest superfamilies of regulatory transcription factors and is widely used in eukaryotic organisms. They play an essential role...
Authors: E. Perea-Atienza, S. G. Sprecher and P. Martínez
Understanding the general trends in developmental changes during animal evolution, which are often associated with morphological diversification, has long been a central issue in evolutionary developmental bio...
The axonal projection from the retina to the optic tectum maps visual information isomorphically from one to the other and serves as a model for the development of sensory maps more generally in the vertebrate...
Current studies in evolutionary developmental biology are focused on the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks in target animal species. From decades, the scientific interest on genetic mechanisms orchest...
Authors: Evgeniya Anishchenko, Maria Ina Arnone and Salvatore D’Aniello
The notochord has organizer properties and is required for floor plate induction and dorsoventral patterning of the neural tube. This activity has been attributed to sonic hedgehog (shh) signaling, which origi...
Authors: Stanislav Kremnyov, Kristine Henningfeld, Christoph Viebahn and Nikoloz Tsikolia
Previous analysis suggested that the relative contribution of individual bones to regional skull lengths differ between inbred mouse strains. If the negative correlation of adjacent bone lengths is associated...
Authors: Christopher J. Percival, Rebecca Green, Charles C. Roseman, Daniel M. Gatti, Judith L. Morgan, Stephen A. Murray, Leah Rae Donahue, Jessica M. Mayeux, K. Michael Pollard, Kunjie Hua, Daniel Pomp, Ralph Marcucio and Benedikt Hallgrímsson
ETCHbox genes are eutherian-specific homeobox genes expressed during preimplantation development at a time when the first cell lineage decisions are being made. The mouse has an unusual repertoire of ETCHbox g...
Authors: Amy H. Royall, Ignacio Maeso, Thomas L. Dunwell and Peter W. H. Holland
The anterior neuroectoderm (ANE) in many deuterostome embryos (echinoderms, hemichordates, urochordates, cephalochordates, and vertebrates) is progressively restricted along the anterior–posterior axis to a do...
Authors: Anita Khadka, Marina Martínez-Bartolomé, Stephanie D. Burr and Ryan C. Range
The development of male- or female-specific phenotypes in squamates is typically controlled by either temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) or chromosome-based genetic sex determination (GSD). However,...
Authors: Sarah L. Whiteley, Clare E. Holleley, Wendy A. Ruscoe, Meghan Castelli, Darryl L. Whitehead, Juan Lei, Arthur Georges and Vera Weisbecker
Batoids exhibit unique body plans with derived fin morphologies, such as the anteriorly expanded pectoral fins that fuse to the head, or distally extended anterior pelvic fin lobes used for a modified swimming...
Life in the darkness of caves is accompanied, throughout phyla, by striking phenotypic changes including the loss or severe reduction in eyes and pigmentation. On the other hand, cave animals have undergone co...
Authors: Victor Simon, Romain Elleboode, Kélig Mahé, Laurent Legendre, Patricia Ornelas-Garcia, Luis Espinasa and Sylvie Rétaux
The model Aquilegia coerulea x “Origami” possesses several interesting floral features, including petaloid sepals that are morphologically distinct from the true petals and a broad domain containing many whorls o...
The evolution of tetrapod limbs from paired fins has long been of interest to both evolutionary and developmental biologists. Several recent investigative tracks have converged to restructure hypotheses in thi...
Authors: Thomas A. Stewart, Ramray Bhat and Stuart A. Newman
Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are of central importance for dorsal–ventral (DV) axis specification. They are core components of a signalling cascade that includes the BMP ligand decapentaplegic (DPP) and ...
Authors: Karl R. Wotton, Anna Alcaine-Colet, Johannes Jaeger and Eva Jiménez-Guri
Nemertean embryos undergo equal spiral cleavage, and prior fate-mapping studies showed that some also exhibit key aspects of spiralian lineage-based fate specification, including specification of the primary t...
Authors: George von Dassow and Svetlana A. Maslakova
