Chenggang Shi, Shuang Chen, Huimin Liu, Rongrong Pan, Shiqi Li, Yanhui Wang, Xiaotong Wu, Jingjing Li, Xuewen Li, Chaofan Xing, Xian Liu, Yiquan Wang, Qingming Qu, Guang Li
A central goal of evolutionary developmental biology is to decipher the evolutionary pattern of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that control embryonic development, and the mechanism underlying GRNs evolution. The Nodal signaling that governs the body axes of deuterostomes exhibits a conserved GRN orchestrated principally by Nodal, Gdf1/3, and Lefty. Here we show that this GRN has been rewired in cephalochordate amphioxus. We found that while the amphioxus Gdf1/3 ortholog exhibited nearly no embryonic expression, its duplicate Gdf1/3-like , linked to Lefty , was zygotically expressed in a similar pattern as Lefty ...
January 17, 2024: ELife