Morfógenos durante el desarrollo embrionario de vertebrados / Morphogens during embryonic development of vertebrates

Durante el desarrollo embrionario, las células de muchos tejidos se diferencian de acuerdo con la información de posición que se establece por las gradientes de concentración de morfógenos. Estas son moléculas de señalización secretadas en una región restringida de un tejido y se difunden lejos de su fuente para formar una gradiente de concentración. La molécula de un mismo morfógeno actúa generalmente en distintas etapas de desarrollo de un organismo y puede provocar reacciones muy diferentes en las células en función de su historia de diferenciación. Los morfógenos más conocidos son miembros del factor de crecimiento beta (TGF-b), Hedgehog (Hh), familias Wnt y los microRNAs.

During embryonic development, cells in many tissues differ according to the positional information that is set by the concentration of morphogen gradients. These are signaling molecules that are secreted in a restricted region of a tissue and diffuse away from their source forming a concentration gradient. Morphogens generally act at different development stages in an organism and cause different reactions in cells depending on their history of differentiation. The best known example of morphogens are members of growth factor beta (TGF-beta), Hedgehog(Hh), and Wnt families or microRNAs.

Cell biology, molecular embryology, Lamarckian and Darwinian selection as evolvability

The evolvability of vertebrate systems involves various mechanisms that eventually generate cooperative and nonlethal functional variation on which Darwinian selection can operate. It is a truism that to get vertebrate animals to develop a coherent machine they first had to inherit the right multicellular ontogeny. The ontogeny of a metazoan involves cell lineages that progressively deny their own capacity for increase and for totipotency in benefit of the collective interest of the individual. To achieve such cell altruism Darwinian dynamics rescinded its original unicellular mandate to reproduce. The distinction between heritability at the level of the cell lineage and at the level of the individual is crucial. However, its implications have seldom been explored in depth. While all out reproduction is the Darwinian measure of success among unicellular organisms, a high replication rate of cell lineages within the organism may be deleterious to the individual as a functional unit. If a harmoniously functioning unit is to evolve, mechanisms must have evolved whereby variants that increase their own replication rate by failing to accept their own somatic duties are controlled. For questions involving organelle origins, see Godelle and Reboud, 1995 and Hoekstra, 1990. In other words, modifiers of conflict that control cell lineages with conflicting genes and new mutant replication rates that deviate from their somatic duties had to evolve. Our thesis is that selection at the level of the (multicellular) individual must have opposed selection at the level of the cell lineage. The metazoan embryo is not immune to this conflict especially with the evolution of set-aside cells and other modes of self-policing modifiers (Blackstone and Ellison, 1998; Ransick et al., 1996. In fact, the conflict between the two selection processes permitted a Lamarckian soma-to-germline feedback loop. This new element in metazoan ontogeny became the evolvability of the vertebrate adaptive immune system and life as we know it now. We offer the hypothesis that metazoan evolution solved this ancient conflict by evolving an immunogenetic mechanism that responds with rapid Lamarckian efficiency by retaining the ancient reverse transcriptase enzyme (RNACopyright DNA copying discovered by Temin in 1959 (see Temin, 1989) and found in 1970 in RNA tumor viruses by Temin and Baltimore), which can produce cDNA from the genome of an RNA virus that infects the cells. It seems that molecular

Diferenciaçäo sexual dos vertebrados: contribuiçäo de fatores somáticos e ambientais / Sexual differentiation of vertebrates: contribution of somatic and environmental factors

Há vários séculos a questäo da determinaçäo sexual dos animais é debatida. No entanto, um verdadeiro avanço no entendimento de como e quais fatores estäo ou podem estar envolvidos neste evento foi alcançado somente há algumas décadas. O presente trabalho descreve e discute os fatores genéticos, ambientais (temperatura, concentraçäo de íons, pH, dentre outros) e hormonais que estabelecem o padräo sexual do embriäo indiferenciado de animais pertencentes às várias classes de vertebrados.