↓ Skip to main content

Hox genes pattern the anterior-posterior axis of the juvenile but not the larva in a maximally indirect developing invertebrate, Micrura alaskensis (Nemertea)

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Biology, April 2015
Altmetric Badge

Mentioned by

news
1 news outlet
twitter
2 X users
facebook
1 Facebook page
wikipedia
2 Wikipedia pages

Citations

dimensions_citation
39 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
30 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Hox genes pattern the anterior-posterior axis of the juvenile but not the larva in a maximally indirect developing invertebrate, Micrura alaskensis (Nemertea)
Published in
BMC Biology, April 2015
DOI 10.1186/s12915-015-0133-5
Pubmed ID
Authors

Laurel S Hiebert, Svetlana A Maslakova

Abstract

The pilidium larva is a novel body plan that arose within a single clade in the phylum Nemertea - the Pilidiophora. While the sister clade of the Pilidiophora and the basal nemerteans develop directly, pilidiophorans have a long-lived planktotrophic larva with a body plan distinctly different from that of the juvenile. Uniquely, the pilidiophoran juvenile develops inside the larva from several discrete rudiments. The orientation of the juvenile with respect to the larval body varies within the Pilidiophora, which suggests that the larval and juvenile anterio-posterior (AP) axes are patterned differently. In order to gain insight into the evolutionary origins of the pilidium larva and the mechanisms underlying this implied axial uncoupling we examined the expression of the Hox genes during development of the pilidiophoran Micrura alaskensis. We identified sequences of nine Hox genes and the ParaHox gene caudal through a combination of transcriptome analysis and molecular cloning, and determined their expression pattern during development using in situ hybridization in whole-mounted larvae. We found that Hox genes are first expressed long after the pilidium is fully formed and functional. The Hox genes are expressed in apparently overlapping domains along the AP axis of the developing juvenile in a subset of the rudiments that give rise to the juvenile trunk. Hox genes are not expressed in the larval body at any stage of development. While the Hox genes pattern the juvenile pilidiophoran, the pilidial body, which appears to be an evolutionary novelty, must be patterned by some mechanism other than the Hox genes. Although the pilidiophoran juvenile develops from separate rudiments with no obvious relationship to the embryonic formation of the larva, the Hox genes appear to exhibit canonical expression along the juvenile AP axis. This suggests that the Hox patterning system can maintain conserved function even when widely decoupled from early polarity established in the egg.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 2 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 30 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 1 3%
Unknown 29 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 8 27%
Researcher 5 17%
Student > Master 5 17%
Student > Bachelor 3 10%
Other 2 7%
Other 2 7%
Unknown 5 17%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 15 50%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 8 27%
Unknown 7 23%