On November 10, The research team of Liu Baozhong, Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, made important research progress in the development mechanism of the dorsal-ventral axis of mollusks, and the relevant results were published in the top journal of biology in Molecular Biology and Evolution with a research paper entitled "New Cognition of The Development and Evolution of CrownEdrons: BMP2/4-Chordin Regulates the Development of dorsal-ventral axis in mollusks".
Dorsal-ventral axial development is a major fundamental issue in animal developmental biology. The establishment of the dorsal-abdominal axis provides location information for the development of subsequent organs, which is the basis for the development of animal ontogenesis, and therefore has always been one of the core issues in developmental biology research, and there is currently a mature theoretical system. However, in recent years, it has been found that as a major animal branch (including more than one-third of the animal phyla), many aspects of the development of the dorsal-ventral axis do not conform to the existing theoretical system, which makes the development mechanism of the dorsal-ventral axis of the crested rotunda a controversial difficulty in the field of developmental biology.
Liu Baozhong's research team took the typical crested chakra- mollusks as the research object and conducted in-depth research on this problem. Through functional experiments such as gene knockdown, it was found and confirmed that the dorsal and ventral axis development of Kasabei depended on the conservative BMP2/4-Chordin signaling system. This is the first report of the existence of such a dorsal-ventral axis development mechanism in crested rotunda, which provides important information for understanding the evolutionary process of the dorsal-ventral axis development mechanism of animals.
According to reports, the team also found that the BMP2/4-Chordin signaling system has been integrated into the unique "organizer-driven" development model in crown rotunda, which provides support for analyzing the function of organizer cells and the unique development patterns of crown rotunda.
The reporter learned that the research team has long focused on the developmental biology of mollusks and has made a series of important discoveries in recent years. This study is another important advance in the field of mollusk development after the discovery of the dorsal and ventral isolation and expression law of the Hox gene (PNAS, 2020). All three authors of the paper are core research members of the team, with Tan Sujian, a postdoctoral fellow at the station, and Researcher Gao as the co-first author, and Researcher Liu Baozhong as the corresponding author.
Text/Science and Technology Daily reporter Wang Jiangao
Editor/Fan Hui
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