HoloCellDeath · Origins and evolution of programmed cell death machinery during the emergence of animal multicellularity
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-03-01 → 2020-02-29
- EU contribution
- €158,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Origins and evolution of programmed cell death machinery during the emergence of animal multicellularity
Regulated cell death is a process in which specific cells die in a genetically controlled way. It is essential in animals: both to replace damaged or infected cells, and as a part of normal development. As a result, understanding regulated cell death is an important step toward finding out how multicellular animals first evolved from their single-celled ancestors. This improves our basic understanding of our own past evolution, and of the factors that led to a process that's a critical factor in cancer and developmental biology today. My objectives with this project were to find out when each protein component evolved; whether any of these components evolved before animals did, in the single-celled animals of ancestors; and what their functions might have been in these single-celled ancestors.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Programmed cell death (PCD) is an essential function in multicellular organisms; it regulates normal development, responses to cell damage, and cell turnover. Accordingly, the PCD machinery present in the unicellular ancestors of animals was likely critical to the emergence of the complex multicellularity found in extant animals. However, we lack a full understanding of the PCD repertoire in the unicellular relatives of animals, and whether that ancestral repertoire underwent significant changes at the onset of MetazoaTo fill this gap in our understanding we will perform a comparative genomics approach, combined with in vivo experiments, to examine the distribution and evolution of programmed cell death (PCD) proteins in the unicellular relatives of animals. This will identify which components of the PCD machinery were already present in the unicellular ancestor of animals, and the functional and regulatory changes that they might have undergone, and which led to the emergence of apoptosis in animals. Of particular interest is the subtype of PCD known as apoptosis, as the most characteristic apoptosis proteins are thought to be animal-specific.To investigate whether functional modifications occurred in the PCD repertoire at the origin of animals, we will perform in vivo experiments in two unicellular relatives of animals, Capsaspora and Creolimax, for which the host lab has developed transformation protocols. We will overexpress, and if possible silence, candidate pro- and anti-apoptotic proteins in those taxa to test whether they induce or protect against cell death. We will also examine protein interactions of these proteins during a proposed secondment. This project will provide the first comprehensive reconstruction of programmed cell death machinery across the group comprising animals and their unicellular relatives. The findings will be of interest not only to evolutionary biologists, but also to microbiologists, and to cell and developmental biologists.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS · MadridCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union