The Trichoplax genome and the nature of placozoans

By M. Srivastava, E. Begović, Jarrod Chapman, Nicholas H. Putnam, U. Hellsten, T. Kawashima, A. Kuo, T. Mitros, A. Salamov, M. Carpenter and 11 more. Nature, 2008

884 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As arguably the simplest free-living animals, placozoans may represent a primitive metazoan form, yet their biology is poorly understood. Here we report the sequencing and analysis of the ∼98 million base pair nuclear genome of the placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis suggests that placozoans belong to a ‘eumetazoan’ clade that includes cnidarians and bilaterians, with sponges as the earliest diverging animals. The compact genome shows conserved gene content, gene structure and synteny in relation to the human and other complex eumetazoan genomes. Despite the apparent cellular and organismal simplicity of Trichoplax, its genome encodes a rich array of transcription factor and signalling pathway genes that are typically associated with diverse cell types and developmental processes in eumetazoans, motivating further searches for cryptic cellular complexity and/or as yet unobserved life history stages.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06bf097042ab7b224fe57580f4fa1776d8a3cca6

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Citations in the corpus

Animal Phylogeny and Its Evolutionary Implications (2014, background): “Some components of microRNA-processing machinery are present in Placozoa (Srivastava et al. 2008), suggesting that microRNA may have been secondarily lost in this group.”
An integral program for tissue renewal and regeneration: Wnt signaling and stem cell control (2014, background): “In evolutionary antiquity, the core of the Wnt pathway emerged in the simplest multicellular organisms (16, 17).”
Homeodomain proteins: an update (2015, background): “Members are present in Placozoa and Cnidaria, with the beginnings of the Hox and ParaHox clusters emerging in Cnidaria (Chourrout et al. 2006; Garstang and Ferrier 2013; Holland 2013; Hui et al. 2008; Srivastava et al. 2008).”
Higher-level metazoan relationships: recent progress and remaining questions (2011, background): “The placozoan genome paper included a phylogenomic analysis of Placozoa, Porifera, Cnidaria, and Bilateria, and was consistent with the classical view of sponges as the sister group to all other metazoans (Srivastava et al. 2008).”
Phylogenomics revives traditional views on deep animal relationships. (2009, neutral): “It should be noted that the position of the placozoan Trichoplaxwith respect to sponges and eumetazoans remains poorly supported in our analyses (Figure 1) and that recent investigations focused on placozoan relationships [11, 35] provided contradictory results, leaving this question unresolved.”
Insights into bilaterian evolution from three spiralian genomes (2012, neutral): “In our analyses, conserved macrosynteny requires only conserved linkage between orthologous genes, and is independent of intra-chromosome rearrangements (that is, scrambling of gene order) that are typical in phylogenetically deep comparisons10,15,23.”
The Amphimedon queenslandica genome and the evolution of animal complexity (2010, neutral): “This is consistent with overall preservation of relict linkages observed here and in other basal metazoan genomes.(22,24,25).”
Precise Regulation of Porcupine Activity Is Required for Physiological Wnt Signaling (2012, background): “The Asn-306 site in particular is completely conserved in PORCN, going back to the primitive eumetazoan Trichoplax and its PORCN-like protein (51).”
Gene duplication and the origins of morphological complexity in pancrustacean eyes, a genomic approach (2010, methodology): “losses (italics, white background) were mapped onto a consensus species tree [79,104,109].”
Revisions to the Classification, Nomenclature, and Diversity of Eukaryotes (2018, background): “(continued) 29Although monotypic, genetic diversity of isolates indicate there are probably multiple genera, and it is probably a sister clade to Cnidaria (Schierwater and DeSalle 2018; and Srivastava et al. 2008).”