Biozentrum, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 50/70, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland.
Dev Growth Differ. 2011 Dec;53(9):982-93. doi: 10.1111/j.1440-169X.2011.01307.x. Epub 2011 Dec 9.
We present an evolutionary approach to dissecting conserved developmental mechanisms. We reason that important mechanisms for making the bodyplan will act early, to generate the major features of the body and that they will be conserved in evolution across many metazoa, and thus, that they will be available in very different animals. This led to our specific approach of microarrays to screen for very early conserved developmental regulators in parallel in an insect, Drosophila and a vertebrate, Xenopus. We screened for the earliest conserved targets of the ectopically expressed hox gene Hoxc6/Antennapedia in both species and followed these targets up, using in situ hybridization, in the Xenopus system. The results indicate that relatively few of the early Hox target genes are conserved: these are mainly involved in the specification of the antero-posterior body axis and in gastrulation.
我们提出了一种从进化角度剖析保守发育机制的方法。我们推断，对于构建身体形态至关重要的机制会在早期发挥作用，以产生身体的主要特征，而且这些机制在进化过程中会在许多后生动物中保守存在，因此它们在非常不同的动物中都存在。这导致我们采用了一种特定的方法，即用微阵列同时在昆虫果蝇和脊椎动物爪蟾中筛选早期保守的发育调控因子。我们筛选了异位表达的同源盒基因 Hoxc6/触角足在这两个物种中的最早保守靶标，并使用原位杂交技术在爪蟾系统中对这些靶标进行了跟踪。结果表明，早期 Hox 靶基因的保守数量相对较少：这些基因主要参与前-后体轴的特化和原肠胚形成。
