ArticleNature communications2026
Developmental system drift in dorsoventral patterning is linked to transitions to autonomous development in Annelida.
Article in Nature communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The anti-neural role of BMP signaling is a consequence of its ancestral function in dorsoventral patterning.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Brachiopod genome unveils the evolution of BMP signalling in bilaterian body patterning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Evidence of autonomous neural specification for both brain and ventral nerve cord tissue in Annelida.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Early nervous system development in the chaetognathFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2026Article
- Cell fate specification modes shape transcriptome evolution in the highly conserved spiral cleavage.EMBO reports · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP) pathway is the ancestral signalling system patterning the dorsoventral axis in bilaterally symmetrical animals. However, in Spiralia, a large bilaterian clade including molluscs and annelids, BMP's axial function varies across species, obscuring the ancestral developmental role of this pathway. Here, we study four annelid species to demonstrate that BMP is ancestrally downstream of ERK1/2 and promotes dorsoventral development in Annelida. Importantly, this signalling hierarchy is lost in annelids that secondarily transitioned to a maternally controlled, unequal cleavage, with some using Activin/Nodal and others relying on BMP to establish dorsoventral polarity only in the head. Unexpectedly, this divergence implies extensive rewiring of downstream targets involved in dorsoventral patterning. Together, our data clarify BMP's ancestral axial role in Spiralia, uncovering a potential causal link between parallel shifts toward unequal spiral cleavage and the emergence of developmental system drift, a pervasive yet poorly understood phenomenon in animal embryogenesis.
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