Volume 8 Issue 12, December 2007

Evo–devo has its origins in both palaentology and developmental genetics, but there is a tendency to overlook the former as being old-fashioned. However, integrating information from both sources is essential to generating realistic hypotheses about how developmental processes evolved.

A module is a linked group of phenotypic traits that depend on each other but are relatively independent of other modules. The insight that developmental mechanisms are modular is important for their evolution, making modularity a key concept in evo–devo and beyond.

The genomics era offers many exciting opportunities to answer questions in evo–devo. Newly sequenced genomes of phylogenetically diverse organisms allow us to chronicle the gain and loss of morphological features and correlate them with their genetic underpinnings.

Evo–devo is now a mature field encompassing a wide range of research areas. The author offers his assessment of its main theoretical implications and challenges for the immediate future.

Remarkably, conservation of genomes of all species in terms of sequence and synteny is accompanied by a great diversity of karyotypes, which can be explained by rearrangements of chromosomal segments. The authors look at how these rearrangements come about, and how their analysis can construct evolutionary relationships among mammals.

Genetic studies in mice are providing an increasingly complete picture of the signalling interactions that underlie the development of the mammary gland; in the process they inform us about the human disorders that are caused by mutations in these pathways, including breast cancer.

Transposable elements are diverse and abundantly present in eukaryotic genomes. To help with the challenge of their identification and annotation, these authors propose the first unified hierarchical classification system for transposable elements. The system and nomenclature are kept up to date in a related database — WikiPoson.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo–devo) attempts to integrate an understanding of developmental processes into the Modern Synthesis of genetics and evolution, which classically focused on how allele frequencies changed in populations. The web focus contains articles that look at the conceptual advances that evo–devo is offering to evolutionary biology as a whole, as well as articles that describe specific experimental evo–devo studies.