There was a mad rush to get to the base of animal tree of life in the past twelve months, in order to establish most primitive animal on our planet, with many phylogenomics studies contradicting each other. In April 2008, Cassey dunn et el published their famous phylogenomics work in Nature, which placed Ctenophores at the base of the tree making them most primitive animal on Earth. Before that work Sponges were considered as first animals to branch off from rest of the animals and hence occupied a most basal …

Imaginal discs are very fascinating structures observed in larva of holometabolous insects and can be defined as Clusters of undifferentiated embryonic cells in holometabolous insects that proliferate during larval stages and then differentiate during the pupal stage upon induction by ecdysone but in the absence of juvenile hormone. If you are a regular to this blog you might have read in recent post dealing with classification of insects , that holometabolous insects are the ones in which the final instar larvae dramatically changes (metamorphoses) …

Our lab in Ibdml Marseille published a new review article on Hox protein function ,which is currently online and print issue will be released in may ( It also happens to be on the cover of May issue) This review is an effort to better understand molecular mechanism employed by Hox proteins while performing their biological functions. Here my colleagues looked into the sequences of Hox proteins from main evolutionary branches of bilateria, which includes lophotrochozoa (capitella) ,Ecdysozoa (Tribolium) and humans, amphioxus from Deuterostomia.

Xiaoya Maa, Xianguang Hou and Jan Bergstrom have reported new material of the lobopodian Luolishania longicruris from the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstatte, southwest China. As many of you might known that Chengjiang Maotianshan Shales in China is home to thousands of exceptionally preserved soft-bodied fossils and hence regarded as fossil paradise .The discovery of Chengjiang biota by Hou Xian-guang in 1984 offered us a very clear means of observing Cambrian explosion ,which is considered as rapid burst of complex life forms around 530 million years ago.The great antiquity and the …

The new edition of carnival of evolution is now on at Miriam Goldstein’s blog “The Oyster’s Garter”. This tenth issue of carnival contains some excellent posts from around the blogosphere. My blog post on HoxA11 and evolution of pregnancy in mammals is also included in it.I really liked the way Miraim presented the post , so dont forget to read the exciting tenth edition of carnival of evolution by logging on to THE OYSTERS’S Garter.
Just to give an idea about the quality of posts available on carnival , here are …