Evidence for pre-planning (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, September 15, 2014, 01:34 (3512 days ago)

The lamprey is an animal from the Cambrian and shows HOX genes in the same order as much more advanced animals that evolved later. Pre-planning is the best explanation:-"The team at Stowers, collaborating with Marianne Bronner, Ph.D., professor of biology at Caltech, focused on the sea lamprey because the fossil record shows that its ancestors emerged from Cambrian silt approximately 500 million years ago, 100 million years before jawed fish ever swam onto the scene. The question was, could the hindbrain gene regulatory network that constructs the "modern" vertebrate head have originated in animals that lack those structures?
 
"To answer it, the researchers created so-called "reporter" genes from stretches of regulatory DNA flanking a specific Hox gene in zebrafish or mice and linked them to fluorescent tags. When inserted into an experimental animal these types of reporters glow in tissues where the gene is activated, or "expressed". The researchers chose this particular battery of Hox reporters because when inserted in embryos of a jawed fish they fluoresce in adjacent rainbow stripes up and down the embryonic hindbrain.
 
"The paper's startling finding came when they inserted the very same reporters into lamprey embryos using a technique developed by Hugo Parker, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Krumlauf lab and the study's first author: the lamprey embryos displayed the same rainbow pattern of Hox reporters as did jawed fish, in exactly the same order along the AP axis of the hindbrain.
 
"We were surprised to see any reporter expression in lamprey, much less a pattern that resembles the pattern in a mouse or fish," says Parker, who pioneered the lamprey reporter approach as a graduate student at London's Queen Mary University. "That means that the gene regulatory network that governs segmental patterning of the hindbrain likely evolved prior to divergence of jawed vertebrates."-
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-ancient-vertebrate-familiar-tools-strange-looking.html#jCp... more the genomes are studied the more this will be found.