Mechanisms of germ cell specification across the metazoans: epigenesis and preformation

Germ cells play a unique role in gamete production, heredity and evolution. Therefore, to understand the mechanisms that specify germ cells is a central challenge in developmental and evolutionary biology. Data from model organisms show that germ cells can be specified either by maternally inherited determinants (preformation) or by inductive signals (epigenesis). Here we review existing data on 28 metazoan phyla, which indicate that although preformation is seen in most model organisms, it is actually the less prevalent mode of germ cell specification, and that epigenetic germ cell specification may be ancestral to the Metazoa.

• Publication year

  2003

• Venue

  Development

• Publication date

  2003-12-15

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1242/dev.00804PMID 14597570
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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