Adaptive immunity is a powerful defense mechanism in vertebrates. A finely tuned interplay of different cell types provides a pathogen-specific immune response to eliminate for example bacteria and ...

A study of fossilized lampreys dating from more than 300 million years ago is challenging a long-held theory about the evolutionary origin of vertebrates. These ancient, jawless, eel-like fishes arose ...

The placoderms were a diverse group of ancient armoured fishes and it's widely believed that they are ancestral to virtually all vertebrates alive today, including humans. Placoderms dominated aquatic ...

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Whole-genome duplications are rare evolutionary events in which all the chromosomes and genes of a species are doubled. This supplies new genetic material to the gene pool and can provide an ...

Some of the great remaining mysteries in zoology concern origins — of multicellularity, complex nervous systems, life cycles and sex, for example. The evolutionary origin of vertebrates is among the ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have two million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, we've learned humans only have about 19,000 to 25,000 genes - ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life – driven by a ring of ...

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life—driven by a ring of ...

Scientists once thought that humans must have 2 million genes to account for all our complexity. But since sequencing the human genome, researchers have learned that humans only have about 19,000 to ...