Evolution of the osteoblast: skeletogenesis in gar and zebrafish.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Although the vertebrate skeleton arose in the sea 500 million years ago, our understanding of the molecular fingerprints of chondrocytes and osteoblasts may be biased because it is informed mainly by research on land animals. In fact, the molecular fingerprint of teleost osteoblasts differs in key ways from that of tetrapods, but we do not know the origin of these novel gene functions. They either arose as neofunctionalization events after the teleost genome duplication (TGD), or they represent preserved ancestral functions that pre-date the TGD. Here, we provide evolutionary perspective to the molecular fingerprints of skeletal cells and assess the role of genome duplication in generating novel gene functions. We compared the molecular fingerprints of skeletogenic cells

SUBMITTER: Eames BF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3314580 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature