The genomes of animal progenitors evolved as mosaics of old, new, rearranged, and repurposed protein domains, genes and pathways and paved the way for the origin and evolution of animals.
Daniel B Mills, Warren R Francis ... Gert Wörheide
Sponges and ctenophores lack hypoxia-inducible factors, suggesting that the metazoan last common ancestor could have lived aerobically under severe hypoxia and did not need to regulate its transcription in response to oxygen availability.
Xavier Grau-Bové, Guifré Torruella ... Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo
The foundations of genomic complexity in multicellular animals have deep roots in their unicellular prehistory, both in terms of innovations in gene content, as well as the evolutionary dynamics of genome architecture.
Sequence conservation in Ras depends strongly on the biochemical network in which it operates, providing a framework for understanding the origin of global selection pressures on proteins.
Simon Weinberger, Matthew P Topping ... Ariane Ramaekers
The coding sequences of a very highly conserved family of neurogenic transcription factors from different species have evolved to generate proteins that have different life times causing them to display quantitatively different neural induction potentials.
The complex chromatin-based genomic regulatory system controlling developmental gene expression in complex bilaterians predates the evolution of morphological complexity and may have been a prerequisite for the evolution of the first simple multicellular animals.
A conserved alternative splicing program is specific to planarian stem cells and is controlled by the highly conserved splicing factors CELF and MBNL; therefore, this mode of regulating stem cells is likely ancestral to all animals.
Debashish Bhattacharya, Shobhit Agrawal ... Paul G Falkowski
The analysis of 20 coral genomic datasets provides unprecedented insights into what makes reef-building corals unique, including the evolution of novel gene families involved in biomineralization, signaling and stress responses that have led to their evolutionary success throughout the Phanerozoic Eon.
