ArticleCell2023
Stepwise emergence of the neuronal gene expression program in early animal evolution.
Article in Cell, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 86 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Multifaceted conserved functions of Notch during post-embryonic neurogenesis in the annelid Platynereis.EMBO reports · 2026Article
- Functional characterization of specialized immune cells in a cnidarian reveals an ancestral antiviral program.Nature communications · 2026Article
- NF-κB: A Diverse and Multifunctional Transcription Factor in Holozoans.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Review
- Wnt signaling patterns a central-peripheral body axis in the early-diverging metazoan Trichoplax adhaerens.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Review
- Deep conservation of cis-regulatory elements and chromatin organization in echinoderms uncover ancestral regulatory features of animal genomes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Absence of conserved immune signalling pathways and increased pathogen susceptibility associated to photosymbiosis in acoels.BMC biology · 2026Article
- An ancient lysozyme in placozoans participates in acidic extracellular digestion.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Decoding cnidarian cell type gene regulation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Identification of Accessible Transcription Factor Binding Sites During the Seed-to-Seedling Transition.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Cilia-driven epithelial folding and unfolding in an early diverging animal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Evolution of the Metazoan Protein Domain Repertoire Revealed by a Birth-Death-Gain Model.Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Voltage-gated ion channel diversity underlies neuronal excitability and nervous system evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Beyond synapses: cytoplasmic connections in brain function and evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- That Stinging Sensation: Modularity and the Origin of the Stinging Cell.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The assembly of the neuronal and other major cell type programs occurred early in animal evolution. We can reconstruct this process by studying non-bilaterians like placozoans. These small disc-shaped animals not only have nine morphologically described cell types and no neurons but also show coordinated behaviors triggered by peptide-secreting cells. We investigated possible neuronal affinities of these peptidergic cells using phylogenetics, chromatin profiling, and comparative single-cell genomics in four placozoans. We found conserved cell type expression programs across placozoans, including populations of transdifferentiating and cycling cells, suggestive of active cell type homeostasis. We also uncovered fourteen peptidergic cell types expressing neuronal-associated components like the pre-synaptic scaffold that derive from progenitor cells with neurogenesis signatures. In contrast, earlier-branching animals like sponges and ctenophores lacked this conserved expression. Our findings indicate that key neuronal developmental and effector gene modules evolved before the advent of cnidarian/bilaterian neurons in the context of paracrine cell signaling.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.