Echinodermata

Moon Jellyfish are in the “Animalia Kingdom, Phylum Cnidarian, Class Scyphozoan, Order Semaeostomeae, Family Ulmaridae, and Genus Aurelia” ( Myers, 2016 ; Espinosa, ; 2016 ; Parr, 2016 ; Jones, 2026 ; Hammond, 2016 ; Dewey, 2016). The morphological description of Cnidarians are corals, sea anemones, jellyfish and hydroids. These cnidarians form a diverse phylum that contains ~9000 species, which live in aquatic (predominantly marine) environments. The phylum-defining trait of Cnidaria is the stinging cell, the nematocyte an extrusive organelle used for predation, adhesion and defense (Holstein, 1981; Lengfeld et al., 2009; Tardent and Holstein, 1982) (Steele and Technau; 2011). Also, this phylum, Cnidarians, are divided into two groups, “Anthozoa (sea anemones, corals and sea pens), which live as

The author James Gallagher explained that “During IVF, of 100 fertilized eggs, fewer than 50 reach the blastocyst stage, 25 implants into the womb and only 13 develop beyond three months”(BBC). Once more the author used Logos to demonstrate the effects the removal of the gene oct4 had in the developing human embryo.

Mesozoic vertebrates of Texas have received less attention than Paleozoic. In the early 1900s E. C. Case collected and reported amphibians and reptiles found in Triassic sediments along the eastern edge of the High Plains, and Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University has also made important discoveries there. Notable are skeletons of phytosaurs. These aquatic reptiles, up to thirty feet in length, had elongated snouts armed with thick, sharply pointed teeth. Their habits were probably much like those of modern crocodiles. Some lightly armored forms were not unlike crocodiles in appearance, except for their long, hook-nosed snouts, but some armored types of phytosaurs may have looked almost like arthropods. Through work centered at the University of Texas at Austin, parts of the Trans-Pecos region have yielded important fossils of Cretaceous reptiles, among them enormous crocodiles and the largest known pterosaur. Much of Central Texas probably contains bones of Cretaceous vertebrates, but the land is so heavily vegetated that discoveries are few. However, remains of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, and even primitive mammals have been found and are preserved at the University of Texas and Southern Methodist University. Fossil vertebrates, especially mammals, of the middle to late Tertiary and Pleistocene ages abound in Texas. Much of the fossil history of horses, camels, rhinoceroses, and other kinds of both living and

A molecular approach was used to test the phylogeny of selected brachyuran crabs and was examined using 16SrRNA and COI sequences and compares relationships revealed by the molecular data. The reason for using 16SrRNA genes is because they are ubiquitous and contains highly conserved regions to identify phylogenetic characteristics (Yang et al., 2016) and COI as universal marker for species identification and effective for resolving the phylogenetic relationships among closely related species (Lu et al.,

In the 1880s, Antonio Berlese, an Italian entomologist, built a system to remove small invertebrates from soil samples. His first design was larger and much more complex than the system that we now make, but it worked in much the same way. Berlese funnels are used for extracting arthropods, an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages (Bio 2 Book, page 684), from soil and litter samples. The earliest fossils with this particular body structure are from the Cambrian explosion (525-535 million years ago), indicating that the arthropods are at least this old. Berlese Funnels work on the principle of insects and other arthropods that normally live in soil and litter will respond negatively to light. Therefore, a light source is used to force the arthropods to move downward, where they will fall into a funnel and then into

There are many vertebrates such as arthropods, mollusks and sponges, which all have a hard-outer shell to protect their soft bodies. For the duration of their life, sponges inhabit only one location. Significantly, mollusks have an organ to help them eat algae off of rocks. Protecting itself, arthropods have shells that shed when they become too tight.

Among the innumerable abundance of incredibly diverse organisms that roam this uniquely life-sustaining planet, Deuterostomes hold a value that truly reflects the how organisms may have changed over our long period of time on Earth. Deuterostomes are unique in their embryonic development when compared to Protostomes and it is suggested that these two groups split at the time of the Cambrian explosion, a brief time in history that blossomed into the vast array of organisms found today. Eventually, the phylum Echinodermata developed and under it, a set of classes arose. Archinidea was one of these classes, and later became commonly known as the starfish. They are radially symmetrical and contain some of the characteristics that set Echinodermata apart.

Planarians are bilaterally symmetric metazoans of the phylum Platyhelminthes usually found in freshwater streams and ponds. Planarians have the ability to regenerate large regions of missing structures and are useful for the investigation of anterior-posterior (AP) polarity in occurrence with molecular and cellular mechanisms. Regeneration involves integration of newly made self-assembled tissue into older pre-existing tissues (Alvarado 2006). Adult somatic stem cells called neoblasts that are distributed throughout the planarian body (Reddien and Alvarado 2004) allow for the regeneration of individuals from minute fragments. Neoblasts are the only mitotically active cells in planarians (Newmark and Alvarado 2000), and can generate any of the

Vertebrates, including mice, have Hox genes that are homologous to those of the fly, and these genes are clustered in discrete locations with a 3'-to-5' order reflecting an anterior to posterior order of expression. There are several differences between the mouse and fly Hox genes, however. One obvious difference is that there are more Hox genes on the 5' side of the mouse segment; these correspond to expression in the tail, and flies do not have anything homologous to the chordate tail. Another difference is that, in the mouse, there are four banks of Hox genes: HoxA, HoxB, HoxC, and HoxD. Vertebrates have these parallel, overlapping sets of Hox genes, which suggest that morphology could be a product of a combinatorial expression of the genes in the four Hox clusters.

In this study, I observe that the Aurora kinase family is an evolutionarily conserved family of genes both in warm-blooded and cold-blooded vertebrates. In vertebrates, it contains three subfamilies. These Aurora kinase protein sequences of vertebrates and one invertebrate were available from the GenBank database. Compared with a previous study

Then for in vivo differentiation, two mice mated and all the blastocysts were collected. 1TF iPSCs injected into each blastocyst and the blastocysts were transplanted into the uterus of pseudopregnant female mice. 1TF chimeric mice were born and tested for gene expression. Then, 1TF mice mated to create F1 pup. These generations were used to test for indication of potential risks that occurred because of the differentiation.

During the course of the past thirty years, the study of model organisms has become more significant in the study of embryological development. A model organism is a species that is easy to cultivate and monitor in a laboratory environment and is used to represent broad groups of organisms. Examples of successful and important model organisms include the Ascidia, Zebrafish, and Medeka species. Through intense researching of these organisms, scientists have been able to gain valuable insight into the developmental processes of many complex vertebrates, including humans.

D. melanogaster is also an excellent model organism in studying embryological development due to its aforementioned similarities with the human genome. Certain homeobox genes found in the D. melanogaster

Arthropods appeared in early Cambriand and since the burst, the Cambrian radiation, the species have been the major component of animal diversity in the past of 520 million years (Edgecombe, 2010). They are probably the most diverse animals on earth, know species reach almost one and two hundred milion, accounting for over 80% of animal living species (Thanukos, 2008). Ranging sizes from less than 1mm and more thand

Chapter 1 began by addressing the research problem and describing the whiteflies that have been studied so far and why the genome of this species is needed. Although, four transcriptomes of different whitefly species have already been published and the data are available to public. These four transcriptomes were compared in Chapter 2 to identify sequence and functional differences across them. The main aim of the Chapter 2 was to obtain a comprehensive transcriptome data set for Asia I species which could effectively used for further analysis in this thesis.