Meeting Abstract
The Animal Kingdom displays a stunning diversity, result of millions of years of evolution. How did single cell microbes become animals with multiple cells? How was the transition from animals such as sponges, with a topside and downside but no front and back, to creatures as us with a front and a back end and an upside and downside? Nowadays the plethora of new genomic data can be exploited to tackle these critical questions on the genesis and evolution of metazoans. We have compared more than 60 genomes belonging to 13 animal phyla and 8 eukaryotic outgroups. This dataset and the analyses performed pay special attention to the taxon sampling, selection of outgroups, and the automatic assignment of gene homology. Moreover, we developed new bioinformatic tools to trace back the origins of genes in the gnarls of the Tree of Life of animals. We show how this pipeline is able to pinpoint genes playing a major role in the dawn of animals, most of them tightly related to classical hallmarks of the origins of multicellularity, but others pointing to unforeseen functions that might be vital to our understanding of the rise of the Animal Kingdom. Some of the genes found have been previously related with the beginnings of animals, proving the predictive power of our approach. However, we also find other genes not related before with the origins of Metazoa, but that hold biological functions that make a huge biological sense in the context of that transition.
