The puzzle of how complex nervous systems emerged remains unsolved. Comparative
studies of neurodevelopment in cnidarians and bilaterians suggest that this process began …

Charles Darwin appreciated the conceptual difficulty in accepting that an organ as wonderful
as the vertebrate eye could have evolved through natural selection. He reasoned that if …

Reconstructing the genomes of bilaterian ancestors is central to our understanding of animal
evolution, where knowledge from ancient and/or slow-evolving bilaterian lineages is critical …

Understanding cell type identity in a multicellular organism requires the integration of gene
expression profiles from individual cells with their spatial location in a particular tissue …

Cell types are fundamental units of multicellular life but their evolution is obscure. How did
the first cell types emerge and become distinct in animal evolution? What were the sets of …

The evolution of the eye is a matter of debate ever since Darwin's Origin of Species. While
morphological comparisons of eye anatomy and photoreceptor cell types led to the view that …

Although outnumbered more than 20: 1 by rod photoreceptors, cone cells in the human
retina mediate daylight vision and are critical for visual acuity and color discrimination. A …

For vision, insect and vertebrate eyes use rhabdomeric and ciliary photoreceptor cells,
respectively. These cells show distinct architecture and transduce the light signal by different …

To elucidate the evolutionary origin of nervous system centralization, we investigated the
molecular architecture of the trunk nervous system in the annelid Platynereis dumerilii …

Phototaxis behavior is commonly observed in animals with light-sensing organs. C. elegans,
however, is generally believed to lack phototaxis, as this animal lives in darkness (soil) and …