Marine Biology Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
Marine Biology Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
Curr Top Dev Biol. 2021;141:119-147. doi: 10.1016/bs.ctdb.2020.07.001. Epub 2020 Oct 13.
How vertebrates evolved from their invertebrate ancestors has long been a central topic of discussion in biology. Evolutionary developmental biology (evodevo) has provided a new tool-using gene expression patterns as phenotypic characters to infer homologies between body parts in distantly related organisms-to address this question. Combined with micro-anatomy and genomics, evodevo has provided convincing evidence that vertebrates evolved from an ancestral invertebrate chordate, in many respects resembling a modern amphioxus. The present review focuses on the role of evodevo in addressing two major questions of chordate evolution: (1) how the vertebrate brain evolved from the much simpler central nervous system (CNS) in of this ancestral chordate and (2) whether or not the head mesoderm of this ancestor was segmented.
脊椎动物如何从无脊椎动物祖先进化而来，长期以来一直是生物学中的一个核心议题。进化发育生物学（evodevo）提供了一种新的工具——利用基因表达模式作为表型特征，来推断远缘生物之间身体部位的同源性——以解决这个问题。结合微观解剖学和基因组学，evodevo 提供了令人信服的证据，证明脊椎动物是从一种类似现代文昌鱼的远古无脊椎脊索动物进化而来的。本综述重点介绍了 evodevo 在解决两个主要的脊索动物进化问题中的作用：（1）脊椎动物的大脑如何从这种远古脊索动物的简单中央神经系统（CNS）进化而来；（2）这种远古祖先的头部中胚层是否有分段。
