ArticlePLoS biology2014
Conservation and divergence of regulatory strategies at Hox Loci and the origin of tetrapod digits.
Article in PLoS biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 84 papers.
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Who cites it
84 citing papers in PubMed, 159 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Evolutionary pathway and genetic mechanisms of fin-to-limb transition in vertebrates.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2026Review
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- The functional roles of zebrafish HoxA- and HoxD-related clusters in the pectoral fin development.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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- The limb dorsoventral axis: Lmx1b's role in development, pathology, evolution, and regeneration.Developmental dynamics : an official publication of the American Association of Anatomists · 2024Review
- TAD evolutionary and functional characterization reveals diversity in mammalian TAD boundary properties and function.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Three-dimensional genome structure and function.MedComm · 2023Review
- Hox genes in development and beyond.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2023Article
- Context-dependent enhancer function revealed by targeted inter-TAD relocation.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Developmental and evolutionary comparative analysis of a regulatory landscape in mouse and chicken.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2022Article
- Spatial regulation by multiple Gremlin1 enhancers provides digit development with cis-regulatory robustness and evolutionary plasticity.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Dbx2 regulation in limbs suggests interTAD sharing of enhancers.Developmental dynamics : an official publication of the American Association of Anatomists · 2021Article
- Spiny and soft-rayed fin domains in acanthomorph fish are established through a BMP-Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
24 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of tetrapod limbs from fish fins enabled the conquest of land by vertebrates and thus represents a key step in evolution. Despite the use of comparative gene expression analyses, critical aspects of this transformation remain controversial, in particular the origin of digits. Hoxa and Hoxd genes are essential for the specification of the different limb segments and their functional abrogation leads to large truncations of the appendages. Here we show that the selective transcription of mouse Hoxa genes in proximal and distal limbs is related to a bimodal higher order chromatin structure, similar to that reported for Hoxd genes, thus revealing a generic regulatory strategy implemented by both gene clusters during limb development. We found the same bimodal chromatin architecture in fish embryos, indicating that the regulatory mechanism used to pattern tetrapod limbs may predate the divergence between fish and tetrapods. However, when assessed in mice, both fish regulatory landscapes triggered transcription in proximal rather than distal limb territories, supporting an evolutionary scenario whereby digits arose as tetrapod novelties through genetic retrofitting of preexisting regulatory landscapes. We discuss the possibility to consider regulatory circuitries, rather than expression patterns, as essential parameters to define evolutionary synapomorphies.
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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.