Meeting Abstract
P1.25 Monday, Jan. 4 Bringing Lophotrochozoa into Studies of Comparative Eye Development and Eye Evolution WEVER, JM*; HENRY, JJ; NEWMARK, PA; U Illinois – Urbana; U Illinois – Urbana; U Illinois – Urbana jwever2@illinois.edu
Metazoan eyes have marveled both developmental and evolutionary biologists since Darwin wrote in Origin of Species, “to suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances… could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” Despite Darwin’s misgivings, eyes did evolve through natural processes. While attempting to elucidate these processes, some researchers concluded that all metazoan eyes are homologous and have a single, monophyletic origin, while others argued for independent evolution across many lineages. Researchers have conducted extensive descriptions and comparisons of eye development between arthropods and vertebrates; however, the same processes are largely unstudied in Lophotrochozoans. Planarians, as basal members of Lophotrochozoa, offer an attractive opportunity to incorporate new data into the field of comparative eye development and eye evolution. Expression and functional analysis of transcription factors associated with eye development in Xenopus laevis and Drosophila melanogaster will be carried out in the planarian, Schmidtea mediterranea, to characterize the molecular mechanisms of planarian eye development and ultimately compare them to more highly-studied organisms. Additional candidate genes were identified from a Xenopus cDNA subtraction library saturated for transcripts upregulated during lens regeneration and are also expressed during eye development. Data from these studies will be presented and analyzed. Finally, the planarian eye cell transcriptome will be characterized using laser capture microdissection and 454 deep-sequencing technology, providing additional data for comparative functional analysis. These initial studies of eye development in a Lophotrochozoan will give valuable insight to researchers striving to compare eye development across phyla.
