New Perspectives on Eye Development and the Evolution of Eyes and Photoreceptors
- 13 January 2005
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Journal of Heredity
- Vol. 96 (3), 171-184
- https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esi027
Abstract
Recent experiments on the genetic control of eye development have opened up a completely new perspective on eye evolution. The demonstration that targeted expression of one and the same master control gene, that is, Pax6 can induce the formation of ectopic eyes in both insects and vertebrates, necessitates a reconsideration of the dogma of a polyphyletic origin of the various eye types in all the animal phyla. The involvement of Pax6 and six1 and six3 genes, which encode highly conserved transcription factors, in the genetic control of eye development in organisms ranging from planarians to humans argues strongly for a monophyletic origin of the eye. Because transcription factors can control the expression of any target gene provided it contains the appropriate gene regulatory elements, the conservation of the genetic control of eye development by Pax6 among all bilaterian animals is not due to functional constraints but a consequence of its evolutionary history. The prototypic eyes postulated by Darwin to consist of two cells only, a photoreceptor and a pigment cell, were (Photograph by Ch. Scholz.)Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- Transgenic planarian lines obtained by electroporation using transposon-derived vectors and an eye-specific GFP markerProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2003
- Characterization and expression analysis of an ancestor-type Pax gene in the hydrozoan jellyfish Podocoryne carneaMechanisms of Development, 2000
- A universal marker for transgenic insectsNature, 1999
- Pax 6: mastering eye morphogenesis and eye evolutionTrends in Genetics, 1999
- twin of eyeless, a Second Pax-6 Gene of Drosophila, Acts Upstream of eyeless in the Control of Eye DevelopmentMolecular Cell, 1999
- Functional analysis of an eye specific enhancer of the eyeless gene in DrosophilaProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1999
- Isolation of a Drosophila homolog of the vertebrate homeobox gene Rx and its possible role in brain and eye developmentProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1998
- Induction of Ectopic Eyes by Targeted Expression of the eyeless Gene in DrosophilaScience, 1995
- Mouse Small eye results from mutations in a paired-like homeobox-containing geneNature, 1991
- ProtozoologyPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,1973