Metamorphosis is a crucial life-history event that can change an organism's form, function, behavior, and ecological interactions. In the Mollusca, several neurotransmitters and neuromodulators play inductive or inhibitory roles in the pathways that govern larval metamorphosis. Nitric oxide (NO) has been implicated in developmental processes in vertebrates and arthropods, but not previously in ...

Image metamorphosis, commonly known as morphing, is a powerful tool for visual effects that consists of the fluid transformation of one digital image into another. There are many techniques for image metamorphosis, but in all of them there is a need for a person to supply the correspondence between the features in the source image and target image. In this paper we use the Active Shape Models t...

This review focuses on what is known about the immune transcriptome during metamorphosis of Xenopus laevis and Silurana (Xenopus) tropicalis. This subject is of importance to obtain a global understanding of the physiological changes operating during metamorphosis. In turn, a good knowledge of the physiology of amphibian metamorphosis may contribute to the fight against amphibian decline and he...

In the recent past, modular robot assembly and metamorphosis has been evolved using gene regulatory networks. However, until now, no methodology exists to engineer such a regulatory network. Three existing representations will be employed to describe robot metamorphosis. A graph rewriting grammar describes state and connectivity transitions between robot organisms at the most abstract level. A ...

Hyaluronan (HA) is a linear polysaccharide of high molecular weight that exists as a component of the extracellular matrix. The larvae (leptocephali) of the Japanese conger eel (Anguilliformes: Conger myriaster) have high levels of hyaluronan (HA) which is thought to help control body water content. We isolated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) from Japanese conger eel leptocephali and measured the cha...

15 days post-metamorphosis) and CR (15 days post-metamorphosis) were not different from the control treatment with an average value of 1.7 (×10−2 mg O2 h−1 juv−1) and 0.07 (L h−1 juv−1) for OCR and CR at 15 days post-metamorphosis, respectively. Also there was no effect on juvenile growth rate. This study shows that short hyposaline events suffered by early veligers of C. peruviana can cause re...

Apoptotic cell death plays an important role in many developmental pathways in multicellular animals. Here, we show that metamorphosis in the basal invertebrate Hydractinia echinata (Cnidaria) depends on the activity of caspases, the central enzymes in apoptosis. Caspases are activated during metamorphosis and this activity can be measured with caspase-3 specific fluorogenic substrates. In affi...

Metamorphosis (Gr. meta- "change" + morphe "form") as a biological process is generally attributed to a subset of animals: most famously insects and amphibians, but some fish and many marine invertebrates as well. We held a symposium at the 2006 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) annual meeting in Orlando, FL (USA) to discuss metamorphosis in a comparative context. Specifica...