Those of you who took high school biology may remember the lancelet, also known as the amphioxus. Its simplified body plan is notable for containing a number of features that it shares in common with ...

Vertebrate evolution was accompanied by two rounds of whole genome duplication followed by functional divergence in terms of regulatory circuits and gene expression patterns. As a basal and ...

Amphioxus, as a basal chordate, offers an insightful window into the evolutionary origins of vertebrate development. Its embryogenesis, characterised by the formation of a notochord, neural tube and ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 108, No. 22 (May 31, 2011), pp. 9160-9165 (6 pages) FGF signaling is one of the few cell—cell signaling pathways ...

Chunpeng He, Tingyu Han, Xin Liao, Yuxin Zhou, Xiuqiang Wang, Rui Guan, Tian Tian, Yixin Li, Changwei Bi, Na Lu, Ziyi He, Bing Hu, Qiang Zhou, Yue Hu, Zuhong Lu, J.-Y ...

Research on the genome of a marine creature is shedding new light on a key area of the tree of life. Because amphioxus is evolving slowly -- its body plan remains similar to that of fossils from the ...

As if tiny flashlights were hidden inside its body, a fish-like creature emits fluorescent flecks, a flashing ability previously considered unique to jellyfish and corals. Researchers found that the ...

Over 500 million years ago a spineless creature on the ocean floor experienced two successive doublings in the amount of its DNA, a "mistake" that eventually triggered the evolution of humans and many ...

Probing the mysterious glow of light produced naturally by animals, scientists have deciphered the structural components related to fluorescence brightness in the primitive sea creature known as ...

Research on the genome of a marine creature led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is shedding new light on a key area of the tree of life. Linda Holland, a research ...