Animals show different behaviors that can consist of various spatially or temporally separated sub-reactions. Even less complex organisms, like ciliated larvae that display important behaviors (e.g. metamorphosis, defense, ...

Although collar cells are conserved across animals and their closest relatives, the choanoflagellates, little is known about their ancestry, their subcellular architecture, or how they differentiate. The choanoflagellate ...

Quantitative analysis of animal behaviour in model organisms is becoming an increasingly essential approach for tackling the great challenge of understanding how activity in the brain gives rise to behaviour. Here we used ...

Background: Calcium carbonate biominerals form often complex and beautiful skeletal elements, including coral exoskeletons and mollusc shells. Although the ability to generate these carbonate structures was apparently ...

Electrophysiology is the standard method for characterizing ion channel function. Two-electrode voltage clamp is a robust and relatively simple version which can be applied to the characterization of glutamate-gated chloride ...

Fibroblast growth factor 8 (Fgf8) is a potent vertebrate morphogen that plays decisive roles in multiple developmental processes, such as cellular proliferation, survival, differentiation, growth and migration. Fgf8 ...

Conserved Noncoding Elements (CNEs) are elements exhibiting extreme noncoding conservation in Metazoan genomes. They cluster around developmental genes and act as long-range enhancers, yet nothing that we know about their ...

The causes and consequences of genome reduction in animals are unclear because our understanding of this process mostly relies on lineages with often exceptionally high rates of evolution. Here, we decode the compact ...

Oriented cellulose deposition is critical to plant patterning and models suggest microtubules constrain cellulose synthase movements through the plasma membrane. Though widespread in plants, urochordates are the only animals ...

Introduction: Nemertodermatida is the sister group of the Acoela, which together form the Acoelomorpha, a taxon that comprises bilaterally symmetric, small aquatic worms. While there are several descriptions of the embryology ...