Pieretti Joyce, Gehrke Andrew R, Schneider Igor, Adachi Noritaka, Nakamura Tetsuya, Shubin Neil H
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637; and.
Instituto de Ciencias Biologicas, Universidade Federal do Para, 66075, Belem, Brazil.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Apr 21;112(16):4871-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1403665112.
The fossil record is a unique repository of information on major morphological transitions. Increasingly, developmental, embryological, and functional genomic approaches have also conspired to reveal evolutionary trajectory of phenotypic shifts. Here, we use the vertebrate appendage to demonstrate how these disciplines can mutually reinforce each other to facilitate the generation and testing of hypotheses of morphological evolution. We discuss classical theories on the origins of paired fins, recent data on regulatory modulations of fish fins and tetrapod limbs, and case studies exploring the mechanisms of digit loss in tetrapods. We envision an era of research in which the deep history of morphological evolution can be revealed by integrating fossils of transitional forms with direct experimentation in the laboratory via genome manipulation, thereby shedding light on the relationship between genes, developmental processes, and the evolving phenotype.
化石记录是有关主要形态转变的独特信息库。越来越多的发育学、胚胎学和功能基因组学方法也共同揭示了表型变化的进化轨迹。在这里，我们以脊椎动物附肢为例，展示这些学科如何相互加强，以促进形态进化假说的提出和检验。我们讨论了关于成对鳍起源的经典理论、鱼类鳍和四足动物肢体调控调节的最新数据，以及探索四足动物指（趾）丢失机制的案例研究。我们设想了一个研究时代，通过将过渡形态的化石与实验室中通过基因组操作进行的直接实验相结合，可以揭示形态进化的深远历史，从而阐明基因、发育过程和不断演变的表型之间的关系。
