Daniel Meulemans Medeiros is an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His lab uses a comparative developmental genetic approach, to better understand the evolutionary origins and diversification of the vertebrate head, a topic Dr. Medeiros has been studying for more than 16 years. Dr. Medeiros has published over 30 original research articles and several literature reviews on vertebrate head skeleton development and evolution, focusing on neural crest-derived skeletal tissues. Dr. Medeiros' research program has been continuously funded by multiple major grants from the NSF and NIH. Current projects in the Medeiros lab exploit new methods for monitoring and perturbing developmental gene expression in organisms occupying key phylogenetic nodes for understanding vertebrate evolution, including the jawless vertebrate lamprey, the vertebrate-like invertebrate chordate, amphioxus, zebrafish, and the African clawed frog.

This volume will use a comparative approach to survey the development of the neural crest in vertebrates, and neural crest-like cells, across the metazoa. This information will be used to reveal neural crest evolution and identify the genomic, genetic, and gene-regulatory changes that drove them.

Contents

Editors ...........................................................................................................vii

Contributors...........................................................................................................................ix

Introduction: Tribute to the Neural Crest ............................................................ 1

Marianne Bronner

Chapter 1 The Neural Crest, A Vertebrate Invention ...................................................... 5

Mansour Alkobtawi and Anne H. Monsoro-Burq

Chapter 2 The Evolution of Cellular EMT and Migration ............................................... 67

Joshua R. York, Kevin Zehnder, and David W. McCauley

Chapter 3 The Evolution of the Neural Border and Peripheral

Nervous System-Insights from Invertebrate Deuterostome Animals ................................. 103

Jr-Kai Yu and Yi-Hsien Su

Chapter 4 The Hunt for Neural Crest in Invertebrate Chordates .......................................... 137

Philip B. Abitua

Chapter 5 Elaboration of Fates in Neural Crest Lineage during Evolution ............................ 157

Igor Adameyko

Chapter 6 On the Evolution of Skeletal Cells before and after Neural Crest ......................... 185

Brian F. Eames, Patsy Gomez-Picos, and David Jandzik

Chapter 7 Neural Crest and Craniofacial Evolution of Early Vertebrates .............................. 219

Shigeru Kuratani

Chapter 8 Neural Crest in Fossil Vertebrates: What, If Anything, Can We Know? ................. 243

Per Erik Ahlberg and Tatjana Haitina

Chapter 9 Evolving Neural Crest Cells: Hopes for Present and Future Understanding ............ 265

Igor Adameyko and Brian F. Eames

Index ........................................................................................................................... 275