Scyliorhinus torazame

Due to their crucial phylogenetic positions, hagfishes, sharks and bichirs have been recognized as important animal groups for understanding of the vertebrate evolution. Indeed, they have been examined by analyzing expression patterns of regulatory genes involving developmental patterning in the context of the evolutionary developmental or Evo-Devo study. However, our surveys on the public sequence databases found that the infrastructures of the large-scale sequencing data in these animal groups are still limited. This situation has frustrated further investigations of the evolutionary process of the vertebrates. To solve this problem, we conducted expressed sequence tag (EST) projects in the Japanese inshore hagfish (Eptatretus burgeri), cloudy catshark (Scyliorhinus torazame) and grey bichir (Polypterus senegalus) applying the conventional Sanger and a next-generation sequencing technology, the Roche FLX 454 sequencing system, and generated 161,482, 165,882 and 34,336 ESTs respectively. We also deposited these ESTs in a newly constructed database, named "Â?ï¾?å¼?ertebrate TimeCapsuleÂ?ï¾?é´?". We confirmed that these ESTs appear to contain a number of available sequencing of the genes for the Evo-Devo study: for example, genes encoding the cartilaginous extracellular matrix proteins which are central to understand the evolutionary process of the skeletal elements, and regulatory genes which are relating to the craniofacial development and early embryogenesis. In this review, we will discuss how hagfishes sharks and bichirs contribute to our understanding of the evolutionary process of the entire vertebrates, summarize the current situation of the publicly available sequencing data of these three animal groups, and introduce our ongoing EST projects and a newly developed database.