ABSTRACT The family “Candidatus Midichloriaceae” constitutes the most diverse but least
studied lineage within the important order of intracellular bacteria Rickettsiales.“Candidatus …

The placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens is a tiny hairy plate and more simply organized than
any other living metazoan. After its original description by FE Schulze in 1883, it attracted …

Nitric oxide (NO) is a ubiquitous gaseous messenger, but we know little about its early
evolution. Here, we analyzed NO synthases (NOS) in four different species of placozoans …

Wolbachiae are obligate intracellular bacteria that infect arthropods and certain nematodes.
Usually maternally inherited, they may provision nutrients to (mutualism) or alter sexual …

The common ancestor of all Metazoa (Urmetazoan) was a nerveless animal (Mackie, 1970,
1990; Moroz, 2009). This hypothetical Urmetazoan likely used electrical and chemical …

From a morphological point of view, placozoans are among the most simple free-living
animals. This enigmatic phylum is critical for our understanding of the evolution of animals …

Placozoans are essential reference species for understanding the origins and evolution of
animal organization. However, little is known about their life strategies in natural habitats …

ABSTRACT Invertebrate Zoology: A Tree of Life Approach is a comprehensive and
authoritative textbook adopting an explicitly phylogenetic organization. Most of the classical …

~ 520 million years ago, the long biogeochemical history of our planet Earth resulted in a
biodiversity burst. The rapid diversification of animals known as the Cambrian explosion …

Cobalamin (Cbl) is an essential cofactor for methionine synthase (MS) and methylmalonyl-
CoA mutase (MUT), but it must first undergo chemical processing for utilization in animals. In …