The Amphioxus Model System.

The Amphioxus Model System. Int J Dev Biol. 2017;61(10-11-12):571-574 Authors: Kozmik Z Abstract The amphioxus (lancelet) was first described by Pallas in 1774 and incorrectly assigned to mollusks. Since then, amphioxus attracted generations of zoologists. It took however almost one hundred years until Alexander Kowalevsky recognized that the larval stages of amphioxus had much in common with vertebrate embryos. Widely studied around 1900 as the 'elementary vertebrate', amphioxus as a model went out of fashion with the decline of comparative anatomy. Due to the scarcity of taxa at the invertebrate-to-vertebrate transition, amphioxus nevertheless remained the species with a privileged position in animal phylogeny. Its resurrection as the popular model of evolutionary developmental biology came with the advent of modern molecular biology and genomics. In the 1990s amphioxus developmental control genes were identified and characterized at a fast pace with the hope that such studies could provide novel insight into an important evolutionary transition: the origin of vertebrates. Indeed, amphioxus was found to be vertebrate-like but much simpler. Its body resembles that of the vertebrate, but it lacks most of the complexities associated with typical vertebrate organs. Its genome is only 1/6 of the human genome and it has not undergone the whole genome duplications that occurred in the vertebrate lineage. For all of these reasons, amphioxu...
Source: International Journal of Developmental Biology - Category: Biology Tags: Int J Dev Biol Source Type: research