ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Causes and evolutionary consequences of primordial germ-cell specification mode in metazoans.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The dynamic evolution of panarthropod germ cell specification mechanisms.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Formation of Drosophila germ cells requires spatial patterning of phospholipids.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- The use ofSystems biology in reproductive medicine · 2023Article
- The Embryonic Origin of Primordial Germ Cells in the TardigradebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Stay on the road: from germ cell specification to gonadal colonization in mammals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Inheritance of somatic mutations by animal offspring.Science advances · 2022Article
- Evolution of germ plasm assembly and function among the insects.Current opinion in insect science · 2022Review
- Uncoupling cell division and cytokinesis during germline development in metazoans.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Review
- Primordial Germ Cell Development in the Poeciliid,Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
- Early embryonic development of Bombyx.Development genes and evolution · 2021Review
- Single-cell deconstruction of stem-cell-driven schistosome development.Trends in parasitology · 2021Review
- Early germline differentiation in bivalves: TDRD7 as a candidate investigational unit for Ruditapes philippinarum germ granule assembly.Histochemistry and cell biology · 2021Article
- Review
- Single-cell analysis of Schistosoma mansoni identifies a conserved genetic program controlling germline stem cell fate.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Primordial Germ Cell Specification in Vertebrate Embryos: Phylogenetic Distribution and Conserved Molecular Features of Preformation and Induction.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Does Shoot Apical Meristem Function as the Germline in Safeguarding Against Excess of Mutations?Frontiers in plant science · 2021Review
- Identification and characterization of male reproduction-related genes in pig (Sus scrofa) using transcriptome analysis.BMC genomics · 2020Article
- The deteriorating soma and the indispensable germline: gamete senescence and offspring fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Contrasting patterns of molecular evolution in metazoan germ line genes.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Accurate annotation of accessible chromatin in mouse and human primordial germ cells.Cell research · 2018Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
In animals, primordial germ cells (PGCs) give rise to the germ lines, the cell lineages that produce sperm and eggs. PGCs form in embryogenesis, typically by one of two modes: a likely ancestral mode wherein germ cells are induced during embryogenesis by cell-cell signaling (induction) or a derived mechanism whereby germ cells are specified by using germ plasm-that is, maternally specified germ-line determinants (inheritance). The causes of the shift to germ plasm for PGC specification in some animal clades remain largely unknown, but its repeated convergent evolution raises the question of whether it may result from or confer an innate selective advantage. It has been hypothesized that the acquisition of germ plasm confers enhanced evolvability, resulting from the release of selective constraint on somatic gene networks in embryogenesis, thus leading to acceleration of an organism's protein-sequence evolution, particularly for genes expressed at early developmental stages, and resulting in high speciation rates in germ plasm-containing lineages (denoted herein as the "PGC-specification hypothesis"). Although that hypothesis, if supported, could have major implications for animal evolution, our recent large-scale coding-sequence analyses from vertebrates and invertebrates provided important examples of genera that do not support the hypothesis of liberated constraint under germ plasm. Here, we consider reasons why germ plasm might be neither a direct target of selection nor causally linked to accelerated animal evolution. We explore alternate scenarios that could explain the repeated evolution of germ plasm and propose potential consequences of the inheritance and induction modes to animal evolutionary biology.
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