Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL CELL
Volume 36, Issue 3, Pages 276-289Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2016.01.010
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Funding
- Al Hershey fellowship from the Watson School of Biological Sciences and a predoctoral training grant from NIGMS [5T32GM065094]
- EAPSI from NSF [OISE-1015679]
- EAPSI from JSPS [OISE-1015679]
- ERATO
- KAKENHI from MEXT, Japan
- NSF [IOS-1355018, MCB-1159098]
- Alexander von Humboldt Professorship from DFG
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Integrative Organismal Systems [1355018] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Novel developmental programs often evolve via cooption of existing genetic networks. To understand this process, we explored cooption of the TAS3 tasiRNA pathway in the moss Physcomitrella patens. We find an ancestral function for this repeatedly redeployed pathway in the spatial regulation of a conserved set of Auxin Response Factors. In moss, this results in stochastic patterning of the filamentous protonemal tissue. Through modeling and experimentation, we demonstrate that tasiRNA regulation confers sensitivity and robustness onto the auxin response. Increased auxin sensitivity parallels increased developmental sensitivity to nitrogen, a key environmental signal. We propose that the properties lent to the auxin response network, along with the ability to stochastically modulate development in response to environmental cues, have contributed to repeated cooption of the tasiRNA-ARF module during evolution. The signaling properties of a genetic network, and not just its developmental output, are thus critical to understanding evolution of multicellular forms.
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