%0 Journal article
%A Davison, Angus
%A McDowell, Gary S.
%A Holden, Jennifer M.
%A Johnson, Harriet F.
%A Koutsovoulos, Georgios D.
%A Liu, M. Maureen
%A Hulpiau, Paco
%A Van Roy, Frans
%A Wade, Christopher M.
%A Banerjee, Ruby
%A Yang, Fengtang
%A Chiba, Satoshi
%A Davey, John W.
%A Jackson, Daniel J.
%A Levin, Michael
%A Blaxter, Mark L.
%T Formin Is Associated with Left-Right Asymmetry in the Pond Snail and the Frog
%R 10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.071
%R 10.23689/fidgeo-2601
%J Current Biology
%V 26
%N 5

%X While components of the pathway that establishes left-right asymmetry have been identified in diverse animals, from vertebrates to flies, it is striking that the genes involved in the first symmetry-breaking step remain wholly unknown in the most obviously chiral animals, the gastropod snails. Previously, research on snails was used to show that left-right signaling of Nodal, downstream of symmetry breaking, may be an ancestral feature of the Bilateria [1, 2]. Here, we report that a disabling mutation in one copy of a tandemly duplicated, diaphanousrelated formin is perfectly associated with symmetry breaking in the pond snail. This is supported by the observation that an anti-formin drug treatment converts dextral snail embryos to a sinistral phenocopy, and in frogs, drug inhibition or overexpression by microinjection of formin has a chirality-randomizing effect in early (pre-cilia) embryos. Contrary to expectations based on existingmodels [3–5],wediscovered asymmetric gene expression in 2- and 4-cell snail embryos, preceding morphological asymmetry. As the formin-actin filament has been shown to be part of an asymmetry-breaking switch in vitro [6, 7], together these results are consistent with the view that animals with diverse body plans may derive their asymmetries from the same intracellular chiral elements [8].
%U http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gldocs-11858/6914
%~  FID GEO-LEO e-docs