Saturday, March 31, 2007

Directions in Research on Evo-Devo

Caenorhabditis elegans,
Gallus gallus,
Xenopus laevis,
Mus musculis,
Danio rerio, and
Drosophila melanogaster.
How right they are. The evo-devo crowd needs to expand their horizons to cover bacteria, protists, fungi, and plants.
So I eagerly read on to see which organisms they would name. Here are their choices:
sea urchin,
dung beetle,
water flea (Daphnia), and
sea anemone.

All animals.
{http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/those_disreputable_evodeviants.php}31/3/07

Developmental programming. Allometry of horns in the beetle Onthophagus nigriventris.
Developmental bias. Variation in body size in C. elegans.
Developmental constraint. Shell morphology in the gastropod Cerion.
Redundancy. Anterior-posterior axis development in Drosophila melanogaster.
Modularity. Sense organs in the cavefish Astyanax mexicanus.
Evolvability. In silico cell-lineage evolution.
Origin of evolutionary novelties. The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis (bilateral symmetry, triploblasty).
Relationship between micro- and macroevolution. The three-spined stickleback and Heliconius butterfly wing patterns.
Canalization and cryptic genetic variation. D. melanogaster phenotypic variation increase during HSP90 impairment.
Developmental and phenotypic plasticity, polyphenism. Ant caste polyphenism and caste determination by primordial germ cells in the parastic wasp Copidosoma floridanum.
{http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/03/animal-chauvinism.html}30/3/07
{http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2007/3/29/evodevo.html}29/3/07