Anterior-Posterior Wnt Signaling Network Conservation between Indirect Developing Sea Urchin and Hemichordate Embryos

How animal body plans evolved and diversified is a major question in evolutionary developmental biology. To address this question, it is important to characterize the exact molecular mechanisms that establish the major embryonic axes that give rise to the adult animal body plan. The anterior-posterior (AP) axis is the first axis to be established in most animal embryos, and in echinoderm sea urchin embryos its formation is governed by an integrated network of three different Wnt signaling pathways: Wnt/beta-catenin, Wnt/JNK, and Wnt/PKC pathways. The extent to which this embryonic patterning mechanism is conserved among deuterostomes, or more broadly in metazoans, is an important open question whose answers could lead to a deeper appreciation of the evolution of the AP axis. Because Ambulacrarians (echinoderms and hemichordates) reside in a key phylogenetic position as the sister group to chordates, studies in these animals can help inform on how chordate body plans may have evolved. Here, we assayed the spatiotemporal gene expression of a subset of sea urchin AP Wnt patterning gene orthologs in the hemichordate, Schizocardium californicum. Our results show that positioning of the anterior neuroectoderm (ANE) to a territory around the anterior pole during early AP formation is spatially and temporally similar between indirect developing hemichordates and sea urchins. Furthermore, we show that the expression of wnt8 and frizzled5/8, two known drivers of ANE patterning in sea urchins, is similar in hemichordate embryos. Lastly, our results highlight divergence in embryonic expression of several early expressed Wnt genes (wnt1, wnt2, and wnt4). These results suggest that expression of the sea urchin AP Wnt signaling network is largely conserved in indirect developing hemichordates setting the foundation for future functional studies in S. californicum.