Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Research on sea lampreys offers insights into vertebrate evolution, highlighting similarities in stem cell gene networks with jawed vertebrates and explaining differences in jaw formation. Credit: T. Lawrence, Great Lakes Fishery CommissionA, sea lampreys, which are causing significant damage to Midwestern fisheries, are also aiding scientists in understanding the origins of two crucial stem cells that played a key role in the evolution of vertebrates.
“Lampreys may hold the key to understanding where we came from,” said Northwestern’s Carole LaBonne, who led the study. “In evolutionary biology, if you want to understand where a feature came from, you can’t look forward to more complex vertebrates that have been evolving independently for 500 million years.
While blastula-stage embryonic stem cells lose their pluripotency and become confined to distinct cell types fairly rapidly as an embryo develops, neural crest cells hold onto the molecular toolkit that controls pluripotency later into development. “While most of the genes controlling pluripotency are expressed in the lamprey neural crest, the expression of one of these key genes — pou5 — was lost from these cells,” York said. “Amazingly, even though pou5 isn’t expressed in a lamprey’s neural crest, it could promote neural crest formation when we expressed it in frogs, suggesting this gene is part of an ancient pluripotency network that was present in our earliest vertebrate ancestors.
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