Finalmente uma nova teoria evolutiva para explicar a explosão Cambriana

Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.

Within a longstanding research collaboration between the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and Bielefeld University together with the Friedrich-Miescher-Institute in Basel and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (Massachusetts), Xavier Fernàndez-Busquets (Barcelona) and Dario Anselmetti (Bielefeld) and their colleagues published online in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution their biophysical single molecule results on the effect of calcium on the interactions of cell adhesion molecules from marine sponges. These simply organized organisms do not have specialized muscle or nerve cells and nevertheless survived the last 500 million years almost unchanged and are considered a link between the single-cell dominated Precambrian and later multicellular organisms.
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Journal reference:

Xavier Fernández-Busquets, André Körnig, Iwona Bucior, Max M. Burger, and Dario Anselmetti. Self-Recognition and Ca2 -Dependent Carbohydrate-Carbohydrate Cell Adhesion Provide Clues to the Cambrian Explosion. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2009; 26 (11): 2551 DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msp170

Adapted from materials provided by IBEC - Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, via AlphaGalileo.