Adaptive immunity is a powerful defense mechanism in vertebrates. A finely tuned interplay of different cell types provides a pathogen-specific immune response to eliminate for example bacteria and ...

Clarifying how genome duplication and triplication events shaped early vertebrate genomes has presented a challenge in evolutionary biology. The genome of the jawless hagfish provides a missing piece ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to ...

Lancelets, or amphioxus, are small worm-like marine animals that spend most of their lives buried in the sea floor, filter-feeding through jawless, ciliated mouths. The vertebrate affinities of these ...

"In vertebrate examples of life-long growth as fishes and amphibians – such stem cells supply the eye with fresh retinal neurons while the animal develops," explains senior author Florian Raible, ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life—driven by a ring of ...