Vertebrate evolution: recent perspectives from fish

Abstract

Recent progress in understanding the evolution of vertebrate genomes has been rapid, and previous notions that all such genomes could be regarded as equivalent in their gene content have been rendered outdated. This notion, often embodied in the representation that vertebrates possess four Hox complexes, still appears in contemporary textbooks of developmental biology. Recent data from the genomes of teleost fish show that this assumption is untrue and suggest that interesting situations might arise from the apparent proliferation of genes among fish.