Biology and Evolution of Marine Organisms (BEOM), Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Napoli, Italy.
Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Biologie Intégrative des Organismes Marins (BIOM), Observatoire Océanologique, Banyuls-sur-Mer, France.
Elife. 2023 Sep 18;12:e87028. doi: 10.7554/eLife.87028.
Cephalochordates and tunicates represent the only two groups of invertebrate chordates, and extant cephalochordates - commonly known as amphioxus or lancelets - are considered the best proxy for the chordate ancestor, from which they split around 520 million years ago. Amphioxus has been an important organism in the fields of zoology and embryology since the 18 century, and the morphological and genomic simplicity of cephalochordates (compared to vertebrates) makes amphioxus an attractive model for studying chordate biology at the cellular and molecular levels. Here we describe the life cycle of amphioxus, and discuss the natural histories and habitats of the different species of amphioxus. We also describe their use as laboratory animal models, and discuss the techniques that have been developed to study different aspects of amphioxus.
文昌鱼和被囊动物代表了仅有的两类无脊椎脊索动物，现存的文昌鱼——通常被称为海鞘或被囊动物——被认为是脊索动物祖先的最佳代表，它们大约在 5.2 亿年前从共同祖先中分化出来。自 18 世纪以来，文昌鱼一直是动物学和胚胎学领域的重要生物，与脊椎动物相比，文昌鱼具有形态和基因组的简单性，使其成为研究脊索动物生物学在细胞和分子水平上的理想模型。本文描述了文昌鱼的生命周期，并讨论了不同文昌鱼物种的自然历史和栖息地。本文还描述了它们作为实验室动物模型的用途，并讨论了为研究文昌鱼的不同方面而开发的技术。
