Before and after the neck: to understand the vertebrate body elaboration from the perspective of muscle, skeleton, and nerve development

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15H02416
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Evolutionary biology
• Research Institution: Institute of Physical and Chemical Research
• Principal Investigator: Shigeru Kuratani 国立研究開発法人理化学研究所, 倉谷形態進化研究室, 主任研究員 (00178089)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 脊椎動物 / 頭頸部 / 発生 / 進化 / 中胚葉 / 体節 / 体壁 / ナメクジウオ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

ertebrate can be characterized by the posession of head mesoderm. Through the study using amphioxus, an animal with no head mesoderm, we found that the head mesoderm was obtained by topographical shift of early mesoderm, and by suppression of this shift, we showed that amphioxus-like mesoderm could be partially phenocopied in vertebrate embryos.
Cyclostomes were employed for the study of hypobranchial muscle (HBM) development. Through comparative embryological observation and cell lineage analyses, we found that the deep position of the gnathostome HBM arose as the result of the shift of relative positions between the pharynx and pericardium. In the ongoing study using elasmobranch (shark) embryos, we have so far found that two paralogues of Lbx genes are diferentially expressed in the anterior and posterior portions of the HBM primordia. Of those, cyclostome HBM resemble more the posterior. We suspect gene duplication behind the novel patterns of muscle.

Free Research Field

進化発生学