The evolution of arthropod segmentation mechanisms

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, patterns its segments rapidly and simultaneously, via a mechanism that relies on the ability of transcription factors to diffuse between blastoderm nuclei. Ancestral arthropods patterned posterior segments sequentially in a cellular environment, where free dif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BioEssays 2004-10, Vol.26 (10), p.1108-1116
Main Author: Peel, Andrew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Arthropoda
Arthropods - genetics
Arthropods - growth & development
Biological Clocks
Biological Evolution
Body Patterning - genetics
Drosophila melanogaster
Drosophila melanogaster - genetics
Drosophila melanogaster - growth & development
Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental
Genes, Insect
Models, Biological
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Summary:The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, patterns its segments rapidly and simultaneously, via a mechanism that relies on the ability of transcription factors to diffuse between blastoderm nuclei. Ancestral arthropods patterned posterior segments sequentially in a cellular environment, where free diffusion was likely to have been inhibited by the presence of cell membranes. Understanding how the Drosophila paradigm evolved is a problem that has interested evolutionary developmental biologists for some time. In this article, I review what is known about arthropod segmentation mechanisms, and present a model for the evolution of the Drosophila paradigm. The model predicts that the primary pair‐rule genes of Drosophila ancestrally functioned within and/or downstream of a Notch‐dependent segmentation clock, their striped expression gradually coming under the control of gap genes as the number of segments patterned simultaneously in the anterior increased and the number patterned sequentially via a segmentation clock mechanism in the posterior correspondingly decreased. BioEssays 26:1108–1116, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ISSN:0265-9247
1521-1878
DOI:10.1002/bies.20097