Ctenophores have traditionally been treated as eumetazoans, but some recent whole genome
studies have revived the idea that they are, rather, the sister group to all other metazoans. …

The Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas belongs to one of the most species-rich but genomically
poorly explored phyla, the Mollusca. Here we report the sequencing and assembly of the …

Gene duplications and gene losses have been frequent events in the evolution of animal
genomes, with the balance between these two dynamic processes contributing to major …

Tapeworms (Cestoda) cause neglected diseases that can be fatal and are difficult to treat,
owing to inefficient drugs. Here we present an analysis of tapeworm genome sequences using …

Traditional evolutionary scenarios posit that land plants emerged from land plant-like relatives,
the charophytes. New phylogenies suggest a closer affinity to simpler pond scum relatives…

There can be no doubt that early land plant evolution transformed the planet but, until recently,
how and when this was achieved was unclear. Coincidence in the first appearance of …

Many of the eukaryotic phylogenomic analyses published to date were based on alignments
of hundreds to thousands of genes. Frequently, in such analyses, the most realistic …

Bilateria are currently subdivided into three superclades: Deuterostomia, Ecdysozoa, and
Lophotrochozoa. Within this new taxonomic frame, acoelomate Platyhelminthes, for a long …

Understanding the emergence of the Animal Kingdom is one of the major challenges of modern
evolutionary biology. Many genomic changes took place along the evolutionary lineage …

Background One of the hallmarks of multicellular organisms is the ability of their cells to trigger
responses to the environment in a coordinated manner. In recent years primary cilia have …