Editor's Summary
21 August 2008
The genes for a simple life
Often touted as the 'simplest' free-living animal alive, Trichoplax is central to the debate on early animal origins. It is a disk-shaped placozoan (meaning a 'flat animal') about a millimetre across and was first observed growing on the walls of an aquarium. Now the genome of Trichoplax adhaerens has been sequenced and analysed. The organism retains many features of the last common ancestor with cnidarians and bilaterians, calculated to have existed more than 600 million years ago. But Trichoplax also contains genes for developmental patterns and cell types which have never been seen in this animal, suggesting that there may be stages in its life cycle that have not yet been observed.
Authors: Abstractions
doi:10.1038/7207xib
Article: The Trichoplax genome and the nature of placozoans
Mansi Srivastava, Emina Begovic, Jarrod Chapman, Nicholas H. Putnam, Uffe Hellsten, Takeshi Kawashima, Alan Kuo, Therese Mitros, Asaf Salamov, Meredith L. Carpenter, Ana Y. Signorovitch, Maria A. Moreno, Kai Kamm, Jane Grimwood, Jeremy Schmutz, Harris Shapiro, Igor V. Grigoriev, Leo W. Buss, Bernd Schierwater, Stephen L. Dellaporta & Daniel S. Rokhsar
doi:10.1038/nature07191
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (692K) | Supplementary information
