Journal article
Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain
- Abstract:
- The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 21.6MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.21203/rs.3.rs-6965966/v1
Authors
+ European Commission
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/00k4n6c32
- Grant:
- 895927
+ National Natural Science Foundation of China
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/01h0zpd94
- Grant:
- 32270439
- 32570616
- 32522017
- 32370461
+ Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/00cwqg982
- Grant:
- BB/Z51746X/1
- BB/X015203/1
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2026-06-10
- Acceptance date:
- 2026-05-06
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1476-4687
- ISSN:
-
0028-0836
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
2405466
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2405466
- Deposit date:
-
2026-04-13
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Zhu et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Rights statement:
- © 2026, The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record