Advanced Chordate Zoology

Download or read book Advanced Chordate Zoology written by Aubrey Salazar and published by Scientific e-Resources. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origin and evolution of chordates is one of the most mysterious and interesting phenomena in evolutionary development science. Chordates are creatures characterized by possession of a notochord and pharyngeal gill openings. They comprise of three taxa: cephalochordates, urochordates (or tunicates), and vertebrates. Chordates belong to a supraphyletic gathering of deuterostomes, together with echinoderms and hemichordates, and are thought to have been derived from the regular ancestors of deuterostomes. Vertebrates evoloved by developing a body design with the greatest complexity among metazoans. Amid the 1980s, a new wave of molecular developmental science revealed that genes encoding interpretation factors and flag pathway molecules assume critical roles in the differentiation of embryonic cells, arrangement of organs and tissues, and morphogenesis for development of metazoan body designs. Presently, another wave of evolutionary developmental science studies revealed that metazoans from cnidarians to vertebrates, despite their diverse morphologies, utilize a very comparable set of interpretation factors and flag pathway molecules for body development: these genes are sometimes collectively called a genetic toolbox.