New discoveries on the control of dorsoventral symmetry patterns in animal evolution
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A team from the Department of Genetics at the UBʼs Faculty of Biology has discovered a new factor - a noggin-like gene - that plays a key role in controlling the pathway responsible for dorsoventral symmetry in animal phylogeny. The findings have been published in the journal Current Biology by the experts M. Dolores Molina, Ignacio Maeso, Emili Saló and Francesc Cebrià, from the UBʼs Department of Genetics and Institute of Biomedicine (IBUB), and Ana Neto and José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta, from the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology, operated by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
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A team from the Department of Genetics at the UBʼs Faculty of Biology has discovered a new factor - a noggin-like gene - that plays a key role in controlling the pathway responsible for dorsoventral symmetry in animal phylogeny. The findings have been published in the journal Current Biology by the experts M. Dolores Molina, Ignacio Maeso, Emili Saló and Francesc Cebrià, from the UBʼs Department of Genetics and Institute of Biomedicine (IBUB), and Ana Neto and José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta, from the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology, operated by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
The planarian (Schmidtea mediterranea), a bilaterally symmetrical basal invertebrate, is a common model used in studies of cell regeneration, organogenesis, dorsoventral symmetry and stem cell regulation. The article describes a newly identified noggin-like gene in planarians that antagonizes the activity of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP), a key factor in determining the dorsoventral axis in animal species. “We have produced the first description of noggin-like genes, factors that had not been characterized until in any animal model and which have a surprising function: they promote BMP activity, in contrast to the inhibitory action of noggin genes”, says Francesc Cebrià, who explains that, “We also show that noggin-like genes are present at all levels of the phylogenetic scale in vertebrates and invertebrates, and that they differ from noggin genes essentially due to the presence of a small amino acid insertion in the functional domain”. The study also presents the first evidence of noggin-mediated inhibition of the BMP pathway in planarians.