"Our team has notched up some important discoveries in the past, including the earliest fish and a remarkable variety of other early
deuterostomes," co-author Degan Shu from Northwest University in China, said in the statement.
A newly described group of primitive soft-bodied
deuterostomes, called vetulocystids, bears similarities to some of the bizarre early echinoderms.
Box gene expression in the hemichordate Saccoglossus kowalevskii and the evolution of
deuterostome nervous systems.
While it has been variously suggested that
deuterostomes (Nursall, 1962), protostomes (Inglis, 1985), and cnidarians (Hanson, 1977) independently evolved multicellularity, the group most commonly considered to have been derived from a separate protist lineage is the sponges, phylum Porifera (as evidenced by Barnes, 1980, p.
Although it is hypothesized that TIMELESS and its paralog TIMEOUT were both present early in animals, TIMELESS has been lost in lineages leading to Caenorhabditis elegans and
deuterostomes (Li et ai, 2016).
As regards the phylogenetic reconstruction of
deuterostome GPxs, BsGPx5 clusters together with C.
To infer the phylogenetic relationships of CrAQP with other AQP grades already recognized as occurring in parazoan, cnidarian, or basal
deuterostome subclusters, we used the dataset and alignment computed by Finn and colleagues to build the tree presented in figure S4 of their 2014 paper (Finn et al., 2014).
Amongst basal Metazoa, including sponges (Porifera), corals, and sea anemones (Cnidaria), the origins of four major grades of aquaporins present in
deuterostome organisms have been resolved via Bayesian inference (Finn et al., 2014).
A recent extensive phylogenetic analysis of
deuterostome genomic data, however, revealed that the vertebrate superfamily contains 17 classes of aquaporins (Aqp0 - Aqpl6; Finn et al., 2014).
Classification and molecular phylogeny of
deuterostome AQPs were recently advanced by massive Bayesian analysis (Finn et al.,, 2014).
Echinoderms,
deuterostome animals, are one of these groups.
Hemichordates, a small marine phylum integral to hypotheses on
deuterostome and chordate evolution, occur throughout the world's oceans.