Tosches Maria Antonietta
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Max-von-Laue Strasse 4, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Dev Biol. 2017 Nov 1;431(1):16-25. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2017.06.016. Epub 2017 Jun 20.
Regardless of how a nervous system is genetically built, natural selection is acting on the functional outcome of its activity. To understand how nervous systems evolve, it is essential to analyze how their functional units - the neural circuits - change and adapt over time. A neural circuit can evolve in many different ways, and the underlying developmental and genetic mechanisms involve different sets of genes. Therefore, the comparison of gene expression can help reconstructing circuit evolution, as demonstrated by several examples in sensory systems. Functional constraints on neural circuit evolution suggest that in nervous systems developmental and genetic variants do not appear randomly, and that the evolution of neuroanatomy might be biased. Sensory systems, in particular, seem to evolve along trajectories that enhance their evolvability, ensuring adaptation to different environments.
无论神经系统的基因构成如何，自然选择都作用于其活动的功能结果。要理解神经系统如何进化，分析其功能单元——神经回路——如何随时间变化和适应至关重要。神经回路可以通过多种不同方式进化，其潜在的发育和遗传机制涉及不同的基因组合。因此，正如感觉系统中的几个例子所示，基因表达的比较有助于重建回路进化。对神经回路进化的功能限制表明，在神经系统中，发育和遗传变异并非随机出现，神经解剖学的进化可能存在偏向性。特别是感觉系统，似乎沿着增强其可进化性的轨迹进化，以确保适应不同环境。
