Peninsula all-media reporter Wang Liping
On November 10, Liu Baozhong's research team at the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, made important research progress on the development mechanism of mollusk dorsal axis, and the relevant results were titled "Molluscan dorsal-ventral patterning relying on BMP2/4 and Chordin provides insights into spiralian development and evolution" ("A New Understanding of the Developmental Evolution of Crowned Rotunda: BMP2/4-Chordin Regulates Dorsal-Ventral Axis Development in Molluscs") was published in the top journal of biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution (IF: 16.24).
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 of the crowned rotunda are not in line with the existing theoretical system, which makes the development mechanism of the dorsal-ventral axis of the crested animal a controversial difficulty in the field of developmental biology.
Liu Baozhong's research team took the typical crested rotunda - 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. The team also found that the BMP2/4-Chordin signaling system has been integrated into the unique "Driven by the D quadrant organizer" development pattern in crown rotunda, which provides support for resolving the function of the organizer cell and the unique development patterns of the crown rotunda.
The research team has long focused on the developmental biology of molluscs 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. The research has been jointly funded by the National Key R&D Program, the Ministry of Agriculture Modern Agricultural Industry Technology System Post Scientist Project, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Youth Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Taishan Scholar Project Funding Project of Shandong Province.
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