The Development and Evolution of Arthropod Tagmata
preprint
OA: closed
Abstract
The segmented body plan is a hallmark of the arthropod body plan. Morphological segments are formed during embryogenesis, through a complex procedure involving the activation of a series of gene regulatory networks. The segments of the arthropod body are organized into functional units known as tagmata, and these tagmata are different among the arthropod classes (e.g. head, thorax and abdomen in insects). Based on embryological work on segment generation in a number of arthropod species, coupled with a survey of classical descriptions of arthropod development, I suggest a new framework for the evolution of arthropod tagmata. The ancestral condition involves three developmental tagmata: The pre-gnathal segments, a tagma that is formed within a pre-existing developmental field and a tagma that is formed through the activity of a segment-addition zone, that may be embryonic or post-embryonic. These embryonic tagmata may fuse post-embryonically to generate more complex tagmata. This framework is consistent with the evolution of tagmosis seen in the early arthropod fossil record. It also calls for a re-thinking of the decades-old division of arthropod development into short-germ vs. long-germ development, and a re-thinking of questions of segment identity determination, and the role of Hox genes in tagma differentiation.
Full text
1,817 characters
· extracted from
oa-doi-fallback
· 2 sections
· click to expand
Abstract
The segmented body plan is a hallmark of the arthropod body plan. Morphological segments are formed during embryogenesis, through a complex procedure involving the activation of a series of gene regulatory networks. The segments of the arthropod body are organized into functional units known as tagmata, and these tagmata are different among the arthropod classes (e.g. head, thorax and abdomen in insects). Based on embryological work on segment generation in a number of arthropod species, coupled with a survey of classical descriptions of arthropod development, I suggest a new framework for the evolution of arthropod tagmata. The ancestral condition involves three developmental tagmata: The pre-gnathal segments, a tagma that is formed within a pre-existing developmental field and a tagma that is formed through the activity of a segment-addition zone, that may be embryonic or post-embryonic. These embryonic tagmata may fuse post-embryonically to generate more complex tagmata. This framework is consistent with the evolution of tagmosis seen in the early arthropod fossil record. It also calls for a re-thinking of the decades-old division of arthropod development into short-germ vs. long-germ development, and a re-thinking of questions of segment identity determination, and the role of Hox genes in tagma differentiation.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.32942/X28906
Subjects
Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Keywords
Arthropods, tagma, segment-identity, Hox genes, body-plan
Dates
Published: 2024-12-10 11:14
License
CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Conflict of interest statement:
None
Language:
English
Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Ask this paper
Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2024) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00