Cnidarians and ancestral genetic complexity in the animal kingdom
Date
2005
Authors
Miller, David J.
Ball, Eldon
Technau, Ulrich
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Elsevier
Abstract
Eleven of the twelve recognized wingless (Wnt) subfamilies are represented in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, indicating that this developmentally important gene family was already fully diversified in the common ancestor of 'higher' animals. In deuterostomes, although duplications have occurred, no novel subfamilies of Wnts have evolved. By contrast, the protostomes Drosophila and Caenorhabditis have lost half of the ancestral Wnts. This pattern - loss of genes from an ancestrally complex state - might be more important in animal evolution than previously recognized.
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Keywords
Keywords: Wnt protein; Caenorhabditis; coelenterate; Drosophila; gene duplication; gene expression; gene loss; genetic variability; genome; molecular evolution; multigene family; nonhuman; phylogeny; priority journal; protein family; review; sea anemone; Animals; C
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Source
Trends in Genetics
Type
Journal article
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2037-12-31
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