MBL Study Illuminates the Origin of Vertebrate Gills

WOODS HOLE – What did the last common ancestor of the vertebrate animals — a very small, soft-bodied marine organism that lived about 600 million years ago — look like?

While the portrait is still emerging, a new study indicates that it had gills.

This week in Current Biology, J. Andrew Gillis of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, demonstrates that gills evolved once early in vertebrate evolution and were later inherited by both vertebrate lineages when they branched.

In this study, Gillis corrects the long-held misunderstanding that the gills evolved separately and independently in the two vertebrate lineages, which had been based on incomplete embryological data.

Through cell tracing experiments in little skate embryos in the MBL Whitman Center, Gillis showed that the gills in jawed vertebrates (sharks and skates, bony fishes, humans, etc.) arise from endoderm tissue, and not from ectoderm tissue as previously thought.

In jawless vertebrates, the gills also arise from the endoderm, supporting the idea that such gills were present in the last common ancestor of all vertebrates.

 The Marine Biological Laboratory is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education.

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