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Hox genes, evo-devo, and the case of the ftz gene

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Abstract

The discovery of the broad conservation of embryonic regulatory genes across animal phyla, launched by the cloning of homeotic genes in the 1980s, was a founding event in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). While it had long been known that fundamental cellular processes, commonly referred to as housekeeping functions, are shared by animals and plants across the planet—processes such as the storage of information in genomic DNA, transcription, translation and the machinery for these processes, universal codon usage, and metabolic enzymes—Hox genes were different: mutations in these genes caused “bizarre” homeotic transformations of insect body parts that were certainly interesting but were expected to be idiosyncratic. The isolation of the genes responsible for these bizarre phenotypes turned out to be highly conserved Hox genes that play roles in embryonic patterning throughout Metazoa. How Hox genes have changed to promote the development of diverse body plans remains a central issue of the field of evo-devo today. For this Memorial article series, I review events around the discovery of the broad evolutionary conservation of Hox genes and the impact of this discovery on the field of developmental biology. I highlight studies carried out in Walter Gehring’s lab and by former lab members that have continued to push the field forward, raising new questions and forging new approaches to understand the evolution of developmental mechanisms.

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Acknowledgments

This author apologizes to the many researchers whose work was not cited in this Gehring lab-centric review. Thanks to Patricia Graham, Jeff Shultz, Alys Jarvela, Alison Heffer, and a reviewer with personal knowledge of the behind the scenes history, for comments on this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Entomology and Program in Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Leslie Pick

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  1. Leslie Pick
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Correspondence to Leslie Pick.

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This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (GM113230). The author declares that she has no conflict of interest. The article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.

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This article is dedicated to the memory of Walter Gehring.

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Pick, L. Hox genes, evo-devo, and the case of the ftz gene. Chromosoma 125, 535–551 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00412-015-0553-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00412-015-0553-6

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