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Abstract

Almost 2,000 years ago, Aristotle approached biological research with the question: what is an animal? Revisited since then through numerous morphological studies that ultimately unveiled concepts such as animal body plans, differentiated organs and principles of developmental patterning, this question remains as vibrant today as it may have been in ancient Greece. Although not the first study to introduce the genetic level into this debate, landmark work by Domazet-Lošo and Tautz in 2010 provided a captivating holistic perspective of the evolutionary constraints governing animal body formation. By capturing transcriptomes across key developmental stages of the zebrafish, fly, mosquito and nematode worm life cycles, the authors had the perfectly timed idea to roughly quantify the evolutionary origin of all genes (orphan genes) that contribute to the developmental transcriptome of the respective species through a novel comparative method they referred to as genomic phylostratigraphy.