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. 2016 Jan 5;371(1685):20150041. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0041

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© 2015 The Authors.

Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Figure 1. — Relationships among five basal metazoan clades with choanoflagellates sister to all animals. Three ctenophore species are shown on the left. The sea gooseberry, Pleurobrachia bachei and the sea walnut, Mnemiopsis leidyi are two ctenophores with their genome recently sequenced. The most recent phylogenomics and comparative analyses suggest convergent evolution of neurons, synapses, muscles and mesoderm in Metazoa. Here, we also stress three major points: (i) neuron is a functional, but not a genetic category; (ii) any given neural system is not a single character, it includes different cell lineages with different genealogies and origins; and (iii) there are no pan-neuronal/pan-synaptic genes. The figure is modified from Moroz et al. [28]. Photos: L.L. Moroz. See text for details.