ArticlePLoS biology2009
Concatenated analysis sheds light on early metazoan evolution and fuels a modern "urmetazoon" hypothesis.
Article in PLoS biology, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers.
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93 citing papers in PubMed, 257 citations in OpenAlex.
- An ancient lysozyme in placozoans participates in acidic extracellular digestion.Communications biology · 2026Article
- An extinct clade of the basal Epitheliozoa: phylogenetic position and implication of the enigmatic Cambrian chancelloriids.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Whole Genome Duplication in the Genomics Era: The Hidden Gems in Invertebrates?Genome biology and evolution · 2025Review
- Long-Term Culturing of Placozoans (Trichoplax and Hoilungia).Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- Origin and evolution of animal multicellularity in the light of phylogenomics and cancer genetics.Medical oncology (Northwood, London, England) · 2022Article
- Tinker, Tailor, Tumour Suppressor: The Many Functions of PRP4K.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Review
- Morphological Characters Can Strongly Influence Early Animal Relationships Inferred from Phylogenomic Data Sets.Systematic biology · 2021Article
- Is Phylotranscriptomics as Reliable as Phylogenomics?Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Insights into the origin of metazoan multicellularity from predatory unicellular relatives of animals.BMC biology · 2020Article
- The ventral epithelium ofBiology open · 2019Article
- Development and evolution of the metazoan heart.Developmental dynamics : an official publication of the American Association of Anatomists · 2019Review
- "Dorsal-Ventral" Genes Are Part of an Ancient Axial Patterning System: Evidence from Trichoplax adhaerens (Placozoa).Molecular biology and evolution · 2019Article
- Social feeding behavior ofFrontiers in ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Bioeffects ofPeerJ · 2019Article
- Trichoplax genomes reveal profound admixture and suggest stable wild populations without bisexual reproduction.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Embracing Uncertainty in Reconstructing Early Animal Evolution.Current biology : CB · 2017Review
- Neuropeptidergic integration of behavior inThe Journal of experimental biology · 2017Article
- Non-model model organisms.BMC biology · 2017Article
- The most primitive metazoan animals, the placozoans, show high sensitivity to increasing ocean temperatures and acidities.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- Deep RNA sequencing reveals the smallest known mitochondrial micro exon in animals: The placozoan cox1 single base pair exon.PloS one · 2017Article
33 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
For more than a century, the origin of metazoan animals has been debated. One aspect of this debate has been centered on what the hypothetical "urmetazoon" bauplan might have been. The morphologically most simply organized metazoan animal, the placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens, resembles an intriguing model for one of several "urmetazoon" hypotheses: the placula hypothesis. Clear support for a basal position of Placozoa would aid in resolving several key issues of metazoan-specific inventions (including, for example, head-foot axis, symmetry, and coelom) and would determine a root for unraveling their evolution. Unfortunately, the phylogenetic relationships at the base of Metazoa have been controversial because of conflicting phylogenetic scenarios generated while addressing the question. Here, we analyze the sum of morphological evidence, the secondary structure of mitochondrial ribosomal genes, and molecular sequence data from mitochondrial and nuclear genes that amass over 9,400 phylogenetically informative characters from 24 to 73 taxa. Together with mitochondrial DNA genome structure and sequence analyses and Hox-like gene expression patterns, these data (1) provide evidence that Placozoa are basal relative to all other diploblast phyla and (2) spark a modernized "urmetazoon" hypothesis.
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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 OpenQuestion graph.