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Understanding the molecular and cellular processes that underpin animal development are crucial for understanding the diversity of body plans found on the planet today. Because of their abundance in the fossil...
As social insects, ants represent extremely interaction-rich biological systems shaped by tightly integrated social structures and constant mutual exchange with a multitude of internal and external environment...
Venomous animals are a striking example of the convergent evolution of a complex trait. These animals have independently evolved an apparatus that synthesizes, stores, and secretes a mixture of toxic compounds...
Annual fishes of the genus Nothobranchius inhabit ephemeral habitats in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Their life cycle is characterized by very rapid maturation, a posthatch lifespan of a few weeks to month...
The freshwater snail Lymnaea stagnalis has a long research history, but only relatively recently has it emerged as an attractive model organism to study molecular mechanisms in the areas of developmental biology ...
Host/symbiont integration is a signature of evolutionarily ancient, obligate endosymbioses. However, little is known about the cellular and developmental mechanisms of host/symbiont integration at the molecula...
The cellular basis of adult growth in cephalochordates (lancelets or amphioxus) has received little attention. Lancelets and their constituent organs grow slowly but continuously during adult life. Here, we co...
Myxobacteria and dictyostelids are prokaryotic and eukaryotic multicellular lineages, respectively, that after nutrient depletion aggregate and develop into structures called fruiting bodies. The developmental...
Anemonefish, are a group of about 30 species of damselfish (Pomacentridae) that have long aroused the interest of coral reef fish ecologists. Combining a series of original biological traits and practical feat...
Ectocarpus is a genus of filamentous, marine brown algae. Brown algae belong to the stramenopiles, a large supergroup of organisms that are only distantly related to animals, land plants and fungi. Brown algae ar...
The resurgence of interest in the comparative developmental study of chelicerates has led to important insights, such as the discovery of a genome duplication shared by spiders and scorpions, inferred to have ...
The clade of protostome animals known as the Spiralia (e.g., mollusks, annelids, nemerteans and polyclad flatworms) shares a highly conserved program of early development. This includes shared arrangement of c...
Variation in shape and size of many floral organs is related to pollinators. Evolution of such organs is driven by duplication and modification of MADS-box and MYB transcription factors. We applied a combinati...
The evolution of vertebrate smooth muscles is obscured by lack of identifiable smooth muscle-like cells in tunicates, the invertebrates most closely related to vertebrates. A recent evolutionary model was prop...
The small teleost fish Astyanax mexicanus has emerged as an outstanding model for studying many biological topics in the context of evolution. A major attribute is conspecific surface dwelling (surface fish) and ...
The transition of life from single cells to more complex multicellular forms has occurred at least two dozen times among eukaryotes and is one of the major evolutionary transitions, but the early steps that en...
Interpretation of the floral structure of Zingiberaceae has long concentrated on the relationships of the androecial members. It suggested that labellum is composed of two structures rather than three or five,...
Skull diversity in the neotropical leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) evolved through a heterochronic process called peramorphosis, with underlying causes varying by subfamily. The nectar-eating (subfamily Gloss...
The diversity of butterfly color patterns can be attributed to a relatively small number of pattern elements that are homologous across Lepidoptera. Although genes involved in patterning some of these elements...
Much has been learned about basic biology from studies of insect model systems. The pre-eminent insect model system, Drosophila melanogaster, is a holometabolous insect with a derived mode of segment formation. W...
Hydractinia, a genus of colonial marine cnidarians, has been used as a model organism for developmental biology and comparative immunology for over a century. It was this animal where stem cells and germ cells we...
The common house spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum, belonging to the Chelicerata in the phylum Arthropoda, has emerged as an experimental system for studying mechanisms of development from an evolutionary standpoi...
Macrostomum lignano is a free-living flatworm that is emerging as an attractive experimental animal for research on a broad range of biological questions. One feature setting it apart from other flatworms is the ...
In Aristolochia (Aristolochiaceae) flowers, the congenital fusion of the anthers and the commissural, stigmatic lobes forms a gynostemium. Although the molecular bases associated to the apical–basal gynoecium pat...
Phoronida is a small group of marine worm-like suspension feeders, which together with brachiopods and bryozoans form the clade Lophophorata. Although their development is well studied on the morphological lev...
Segmentation in arthropods typically occurs by sequential addition of segments from a posterior growth zone. However, the amount of tissue required for growth and the cell behaviors producing posterior elongat...
Phoronids, rhynchonelliform and linguliform brachiopods show striking similarities in their embryonic fate maps, in particular in their axis specification and regionalization. However, although brachiopod deve...
The pisiform and calcaneus are paralogous bones of the wrist and ankle and are the only carpal and tarsal, respectively, to develop from two ossification centers with an associated growth plate in mammals. Hum...
In various ascidian species, circulating stem cells have been documented to be involved in asexual reproduction and whole-body regeneration. Studies of these cell population(s) are mainly restricted to colonia...
When animals are exposed to an extreme environmental stress, one of three possible outcomes takes place: the animal dies, the animal avoids the environmental stress and survives, or the animal tolerates the en...
Annual killifishes are adapted to surviving and reproducing over alternating dry and wet seasons. During the dry season, all adults die and desiccation-resistant embryos remain encased in dry mud for months or...
Forkhead box (Fox) transcription factors evolved early in animal evolution and represent important components of conserved gene regulatory networks (GRNs) during animal development. Most of the researches conc...
Nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors likely evolved in the cnidarian–bilaterian common ancestor. Both receptor families are best known for their role at chemical synapses in bilaterian animals, but...
The integrity and organization of animal tissues depend upon specialized protein complexes that mediate adhesion between cells with each other (cadherin-based adherens junctions), and with the extracellular ma...
Eyes have evolved and been lost multiple times during animal evolution, however, the process of eye loss has only been reconstructed in a few cases. Mollusks exhibit eyes as varied as the octopod camera eye or...
Mutations in gene regulatory networks often lead to genetic divergence without impacting gene expression or developmental patterning. The rules governing this process of developmental systems drift, including ...
Understanding the drivers of morphological diversity is a persistent challenge in evolutionary biology. Here, we investigate functional diversification of secretory cells in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis
Recent findings regarding early lophotrochozoan development have altered the conventional model of neurogenesis and revealed that peripheral sensory elements play a key role in the initial organization of the ...
The genetic basis of wing development has been well characterised for model insect species, but remains poorly understood in phylogenetically divergent, non-model taxa. Wing-polymorphic insect species potentia...
The 2018 Cnidarian Model Systems Meeting (Cnidofest) was held September 6–9th at the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, FL. Cnidofest 2018, which built upon the mo...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
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