ArticleNature2016
The mid-developmental transition and the evolution of animal body plans.
Article in Nature, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 142 papers.
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Who cites it
142 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Single-phage profiling illuminates viral individuality during bacterial cell fate determination.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Developmentally inspired synthetic kidney engineering.Nature biotechnology · 2026Review
- Natural variation in Arabidopsis uncouples leaf and flower development and reveals massive transcriptomic heterochrony.Journal of experimental botany · 2026Article
- Hypoxia-induced gene expression changes in N. vectensis embryos.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A cellular basis for the hourglass pattern in vertebrate embryogenesis.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Uniqueness and predictability in evolution and the history of mollusks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Single-phage profiling illuminates viral individuality during cell fate determination.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Toward mechanisms underlying the developmental hourglass: evolvability and phylotypic conservation.EvoDevo · 2025Review
- The phylotranscriptomic profile of angiosperm seed development follows a reverse hourglass pattern.The Plant cell · 2025Article
- Article
- Cell type-independent timekeeping gene modules enable embryonic stage prediction in zebrafish.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Recently Evolved, Stage-Specific Genes Are Enriched at Life-Stage Transitions in Flies.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2025Article
- Chromosomes remain individualized through interphase in embryos of the tardigradebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cell fate specification modes shape transcriptome evolution in the highly conserved spiral cleavage.EMBO reports · 2025Article
- Establishing single cell RNA transcriptomics: a brief guide.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Review
- The Interplay of Ontogeny and Phylogeny at the Transcriptome Level of the Tetrapod Heart.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2025Article
- FGF and BMP pathway genes are expressed in segmentally iterated domains during segmentation of germ layers in a tardigrade.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Unraveling developmental gene regulation in holometabolous insects through comparative transcriptomics and proteomics.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Lineage-resolved analysis of embryonic gene expression evolution inScience (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
82 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
26 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Animals are grouped into ~35 'phyla' based upon the notion of distinct body plans. Morphological and molecular analyses have revealed that a stage in the middle of development--known as the phylotypic period--is conserved among species within some phyla. Although these analyses provide evidence for their existence, phyla have also been criticized as lacking an objective definition, and consequently based on arbitrary groupings of animals. Here we compare the developmental transcriptomes of ten species, each annotated to a different phylum, with a wide range of life histories and embryonic forms. We find that in all ten species, development comprises the coupling of early and late phases of conserved gene expression. These phases are linked by a divergent 'mid-developmental transition' that uses species-specific suites of signalling pathways and transcription factors. This mid-developmental transition overlaps with the phylotypic period that has been defined previously for three of the ten phyla, suggesting that transcriptional circuits and signalling mechanisms active during this transition are crucial for defining the phyletic body plan and that the mid-developmental transition may be used to define phylotypic periods in other phyla. Placing these observations alongside the reported conservation of mid-development within phyla, we propose that a phylum may be defined as a collection of species whose gene expression at the mid-developmental transition is both highly conserved among them, yet divergent relative to other species.
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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.