The apparent evolvability of the vertebrate head skeleton has allowed a diverse array of shapes, sizes, and compositions of the head in order to better adapt species to their environments. This encompasses feeding, breathing, sensing, and communicating: the head skeleton somehow participated in the evolution of all these critical processes for the last 500 million years. Through evolution, present head diversity was made possible via developmental modifications to the first head skeletal genetic program. Understanding the development of the vertebrate common ancestor's head skeleton is thus an important step in identifying how different lineages have respectively achieved their many innovations in the head. To this end, cyclostomes (jawless vertebrates) are extremely useful, having diverged from jawed vertebrates approximately 400 million years ago, at the deepest node within living vertebrates. From this ancestral vantage point (that is, the node connecting cyclostomes and gnathostomes) we can best identify the earliest major differences in development between vertebrate classes, and start to address how these might translate onto morphology. In this review we survey what is currently known about the cell biology and gene expression during head development in modern vertebrates, allowing us to better characterize the developmental genetics driving head skeleton formation in the most recent common ancestor of all living vertebrates. By pairing this vertebrate composite with information from fossil chordates, we can also deduce how gene regulatory modules might have been arranged in the ancestral vertebrate head. Together, we can immediately begin to understand which aspects of head skeletal development are the most conserved, and which are divergent, informing us as to when the first differences appear during development, and thus which pathways or cell types might be involved in generating lineage specific shape and structure.

• MeSH
• biologická evoluce * MeSH
• genetická variace * MeSH
• hlava růst a vývoj   MeSH
• lebka růst a vývoj   MeSH
• obratlovci genetika   růst a vývoj   MeSH
• zkameněliny MeSH
• zvířata MeSH
• Check Tag
• zvířata MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• přehledy MeSH

The appearance of jaws was a turning point in vertebrate evolution because it allowed primitive vertebrates to capture and process large, motile prey. The vertebrate jaw consists of separate dorsal and ventral skeletal elements connected by a joint. How this structure evolved from the unjointed gill bar of a jawless ancestor is an unresolved question in vertebrate evolution. To understand the developmental bases of this evolutionary transition, we examined the expression of 12 genes involved in vertebrate pharyngeal patterning in the modern jawless fish lamprey. We find nested expression of Dlx genes, as well as combinatorial expression of Msx, Hand and Gsc genes along the dorso-ventral (DV) axis of the lamprey pharynx, indicating gnathostome-type pharyngeal patterning evolved before the appearance of the jaw. In addition, we find that Bapx and Gdf5/6/7, key regulators of joint formation in gnathostomes, are not expressed in the lamprey first arch, whereas Barx, which is absent from the intermediate first arch in gnathostomes, marks this domain in lamprey. Taken together, these data support a new scenario for jaw evolution in which incorporation of Bapx and Gdf5/6/7 into a preexisting DV patterning program drove the evolution of the jaw by altering the identity of intermediate first-arch chondrocytes. We present this "Pre-pattern/Cooption" model as an alternative to current models linking the evolution of the jaw to the de novo appearance of sophisticated pharyngeal DV patterning.

• MeSH
• biologická evoluce MeSH
• biologické modely MeSH
• čelisti anatomie a histologie   MeSH
• homeodoménové proteiny genetika   metabolismus   MeSH
• mihule anatomie a histologie   genetika   MeSH
• molekulární sekvence - údaje MeSH
• obratlovci anatomie a histologie   genetika   MeSH
• rozvržení tělního plánu MeSH
• transkripční faktory bHLH genetika   metabolismus   MeSH
• transkripční faktory genetika   metabolismus   MeSH
• vývojová regulace genové exprese MeSH
• zvířata MeSH
• Check Tag
• zvířata MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• práce podpořená grantem MeSH
• Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural MeSH