In a brainless marine worm, researchers find the developmental ‘scaffold’ for the vertebrate brain

From PhysOrg:

The origin of the exquisitely complex vertebrate brain is somewhat mysterious. “In terms of evolution, it basically pops up out of nowhere. You don't see anything anatomically like it in other animals,” says Ariel Pani, an investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and a graduate student at the University of Chicago. But this week in the journal Nature, Pani and colleagues report finding some of the genetic processes that regulate vertebrate brain development in (of all places) the acorn worm, a brainless, burrowing marine invertebrate that they collected from Waquoit Bay in Falmouth, Mass.

The scientists were searching for ancestral evidence of three “signaling centers” in the vertebrate embryo that are major components of an “invisible scaffold that sets up the foundation of how the brain develops,” Pani says. Diagnostic molecular features of these signaling centers are mostly missing in the sea squirts and the lancelets, the invertebrate chordates that are the closest evolutionary relatives of the vertebrates. This had suggested that these signaling centers are key innovations that arose de novo in the vertebrate lineage. Yet, surprisingly, the scientists found highly similar signaling centers in the more distantly related acorn worm (Saccoglossus kowalevskii), a hemichordate. Acorn worm embryos lack nervous system structures comparable to vertebrate brains, and their lineages diverged from vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. Pani and colleagues found that, in the acorn worm, the signaling centers direct the formation of the embryonic body plan.

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