Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks Controlling Body Plan Development

Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks Controlling Body Plan Development

Evolutionary change in animal morphology results from alteration of the functional organization of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that control development of the body plan. A major mechanism of evolutionary change in GRN structure is alteration of cis-regulatory modules that determine regulatory gene expression. Here we consider the causes and consequences of GRN evolution. Although some G...

Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks that Control Embryonic Development of the Body Plan

Alteration of the functional organization of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that control development of the body plan causes evolutionary change in animal morphology. A major mechanism of evolutionary change in GRN structure is alteration of cis-regulatory modules that determine regulatory gene expression. Both evolutionary conservation and evolutionary innovation must be considered in ter...

Gene regulatory networks and the evolution of animal body plans.

Development of the animal body plan is controlled by large gene regulatory networks (GRNs), and hence evolution of body plans must depend upon change in the architecture of developmental GRNs. However, these networks are composed of diverse components that evolve at different rates and in different ways. Because of the hierarchical organization of developmental GRNs, some kinds of change affect...

Editorial: Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks in Plant Development

Controlling Robots with Fractal Gene Regulatory Networks

Fractal proteins are a new evolvable method of mapping genotype to phenotype through a developmental process, where genes are expressed into proteins comprised of subsets of the Mandelbrot set. The resulting network of gene and protein interactions can be designed by evolution to produce specific patterns, which in turn can be used to solve problems. This chapter introduces the fractal developm...