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  • Title: Hagfish and lamprey Hox genes reveal conservation of temporal colinearity in vertebrates.
    Author: Pascual-Anaya J, Sato I, Sugahara F, Higuchi S, Paps J, Ren Y, Takagi W, Ruiz-Villalba A, Ota KG, Wang W, Kuratani S.
    Journal: Nat Ecol Evol; 2018 May; 2(5):859-866. PubMed ID: 29610468.
    Abstract:
    Hox genes exert fundamental roles for proper regional specification along the main rostro-caudal axis of animal embryos. They are generally expressed in restricted spatial domains according to their position in the cluster (spatial colinearity)-a feature that is conserved across bilaterians. In jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes), the position in the cluster also determines the onset of expression of Hox genes (a feature known as whole-cluster temporal colinearity (WTC)), while in invertebrates this phenomenon is displayed as a subcluster-level temporal colinearity. However, little is known about the expression profile of Hox genes in jawless vertebrates (cyclostomes); therefore, the evolutionary origin of WTC, as seen in gnathostomes, remains a mystery. Here, we show that Hox genes in cyclostomes are expressed according to WTC during development. We investigated the Hox repertoire and Hox gene expression profiles in three different species-a hagfish, a lamprey and a shark-encompassing the two major groups of vertebrates, and found that these are expressed following a whole-cluster, temporally staggered pattern, indicating that WTC has been conserved during the past 500 million years despite drastically different genome evolution and morphological outputs between jawless and jawed vertebrates.
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