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 ...

Background: Eyes in bilaterian metazoans have been described as being composed of either ciliary or rhabdomeric photoreceptors. Phylogenetic distribution, as well as distinct morphologies and characteristic deployment of ...

Background: Stereotypic cleavage patterns play a crucial role in cell fate determination by precisely positioning early embryonic blastomeres. Although misplaced cell divisions can alter blastomere fates and cause embryonic ...

The functions of secreted animal mucuses are remarkably diverse and include lubricants, wet adhesives, protective barriers, and mineralizing agents. Although present in all animals, many open questions related to the ...

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 ...