ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Diversification of the eutherian placenta is associated with changes in the pace of life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Placental crises: disruptive selection and maternal under-investment as the foundations of mammalian placental evolution and dysfunction.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Stromal resistance to placental invasion is a derived trait in ruminants.The Journal of reproduction and development · 2026Review
- Evidence for coopetition at the maternal-fetal interface shaping placental invasion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- United by conflict: Convergent signatures of parental conflict in angiosperms and placental mammals.The Journal of heredity · 2024Review
- The effect of placentation type, litter size, lactation and gestation length on cancer risk in mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The human placenta: new perspectives on its formation and function during early pregnancy.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A burst of genomic innovation at the origin of placental mammals mediated embryo implantation.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Tracing the cis-regulatory changes underlying the endometrial control of placental invasion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Leftovers of viruses in human physiology.Brain structure & function · 2021Review
- Eutherian-Specific Gene TRIML2 Attenuates Inflammation in the Evolution of Placentation.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Lifetime cancer prevalence and life history traits in mammals.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2020Article
- Physiological profile of undifferentiated bovine blastocyst-derived trophoblasts.Biology open · 2019Article
- De novo characterization of placental transcriptome in the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber L.).Functional & integrative genomics · 2019Article
- The placenta goes viral: Retroviruses control gene expression in pregnancy.PLoS biology · 2018Article
- Enhancer reprogramming in mammalian genomes.BMC bioinformatics · 2018Article
- Transcriptomic Changes Associated with Pregnancy in a Marsupial, the Gray Short-Tailed Opossum Monodelphis domestica.PloS one · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Few mammalian organs vary as dramatically among species as the placenta. This variation is remarkable considering that the placenta's primary function--transfer of nutrients and waste between mother and offspring--does not differ among species. Evolutionary changes in placental morphology remain poorly understood, with suggestions that parent-offspring conflict or evolutionary changes in life history might drive placental evolution. Here we demonstrate that life history differences among eutherian mammals are associated with major transitions in maternofetal interdigitation and placental invasiveness. We show that the repeated evolution of villous interdigitation is associated with reduced offspring production early in life and an increased lifespan. Further changes in placental morphology that reestablish a larger surface area are also associated with a change back to greater offspring production. After controlling for these differences in interdigitation, we also show that the least invasive placental type is associated with a fast pace of life. We predict that selection for a faster pace of life intensifies parent-offspring conflict, and that the repeated evolution of less-invasive placental structures might have allowed mothers to wrest back control of gestation from the fetus and alter their relative allocation to offspring production across life.
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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.