Topic: cnidarians

Nervous system is a defining feature of most metazoans. It consists of billions of neurons that provides sensory and cognitive abilities in animals to perform complex behaviors. Although nervous system has been at the focus of research for many years, the knowledge about its evolutionary origin is still in its infancy. What are the ancestral features of the nervous system and how it has originated and evolved over time to generate neuronal complexity in higher animals?To answer these questions, we are working on cnidarians that are placed in a phylogenetic tree as sister group to all bilateria

Living functions depend on temperature: an optimal one may increase the rate of development and reproduction, while extreme ones may stop basic biochemical reactions affecting an organism irreversibly. Therefore, sensing temperature and thermoregulatory behaviours may have been core functions of the nervous system since its origin in multicellular animals. It is possible to shed light on this hypothesis by studying cnidarians. Cnidarians (e.g., jellyfish) and bilaterians split from a common ancestor, the first carrier of neurons, about 750 million years ago. Neural thermal responses and thermo