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Search for the missing unicellular relatives of animals

Descrizione del progetto

Scoprire lignaggi sconosciuti vicini agli animali per comprenderne l’origine

Con il progetto MISSINGRELATIVES, finanziato dal CER, la possibilità di svelare misteri dell’evoluzione animale farà un grande salto in avanti. Il progetto mira a far luce sull’emergere degli animali dai loro antenati unicellulari. Recenti studi su diversi parenti unicellulari degli animali hanno rivelato che l’antenato unicellulare possedeva una gamma di geni legati alla multicellularità più ampia di quanto precedentemente conosciuto. Tuttavia, esiste ancora un divario notevole tra i primi animali a ramificarsi e i loro omologhi unicellulari, forse a causa di lignaggi intermedi non ancora scoperti. Il progetto utilizzerà metodi di metasequenziamento a lettura lunga e di etichettatura senza fissazione. Offrendo una comprensione esaustiva della diversità dei parenti degli animali, questa ricerca risponderà a interrogativi fondamentali sulle origini degli animali e sarà utile agli ecologi.

Obiettivo

How animals emerged from their unicellular ancestors remains a major evolutionary question. Work done on diverse unicellular relatives of animals demonstrated that the unicellular ancestor of animals had a larger repertoire of genes associated with multicellularity than previously thought. These include “animal-specific” genes such as protein tyrosine kinases, integrins and Brachyury. This suggests a latent genetic potential in place at the origin of animals and hints at a much more gradual transition in their emergence. However, a comparison of extant early-branching animals and their unicellular relatives still reveals an abrupt difference between protists and the body plans of extant animals. This gap could be due to intermediate lineages going extinct, or that descendants of key lineages have not been found yet. Recent DNA environmental surveys suggest the latter, revealing several novel kingdom-level lineages that branch close to animals and remain unknown.

We will not make progress in understanding the origin of animals until we have explored the real diversity of animals’ closest relatives and isolated the major lineages that remain uncharacterized. Indeed, some of the answers to animal origins that we can not currently address with our taxon sampling are likely hiding in hindsight in those unsampled lineages. Notably, a targeted survey of animal relatives has not been done. I propose to do this by exploiting recent developments in long-read metabarcoding. We will screen different environments and isolate the novel lineages using fixation-free labeling methods. We will culture them and get their genomes.

We will provide a complete picture of the diversity among animal relatives, which will also be relevant to ecologists. Notably, the novel lineages will allow us to address fundamental questions about the origin of animals that cannot be answered with the current taxon sampling, including the origin of embryogenesis and spatial cell differentiation.

Meccanismo di finanziamento

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

Istituzione ospitante

AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 2 499 948,00
Indirizzo
CALLE SERRANO 117
28006 Madrid
Spagna

Mostra sulla mappa

Regione
Comunidad de Madrid Comunidad de Madrid Madrid
Tipo di attività
Research Organisations
Collegamenti
Costo totale
€ 2 499 948,00

Beneficiari (1)