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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...
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 ...
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...
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, ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
EvoDevo