Evolutionary origins of animal skeletal biomineralization.

Origins of Skeletal Biomineralization: Molecular Evidence

Skeletal matrix proteins Comparative analysis of ofinvertebrate their animals : amino acid sequences

The genetic bases of skeletogenesis are expected to shed light on the origins of metazoan biomineralization. Here we review aspeets of genetic machineries of inyertebrate sk letogenesis, including regulutory genes involyed in hiomi"eralization as well, and with an enumerative reference to the genes encoding skeletal mahix proteins. The complete primary structure has been determilled for a total...

A Grand Unified Theory of Biomineralization

The geological record indicates that the major animal phyla began biomineralizing in a relatively short interval of time during the Cambrian evolutionary explosion, about 525 Myr ago. Because these phyla diverged well before this biomineralization event, it was triggered either by an unprecedented lateral genetic transfer, or was the result of parallel exaptation of an ancestral biomineral syst...

Biomineralization and Evolutionary History

The Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen famously distinguished between proximal and ultimate explanations in biology. Proximally, biologists seek a mechanistic understanding of how organisms function; most of this volume addresses the molecular and physiological bases of biomineralization. But while much of biology might be viewed as a particularly interesting form of chemistry, it is more than tha...

Symbiophagy and biomineralization in the “living fossil” Astrosclera willeyana

Representatives of all major metazoan lineages form biominerals. The molecular mechanisms that underlie this widespread and evolutionarily ancient ability are gradually being revealed for some lineages. However, until a wider range of metazoan biomineralization strategies are understood, the true diversity, and therefore the evolutionary origins of this process, will remain unknown. We have pre...