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Echinoderms : Focus on the Sea Urchin Model in Cellular and Developmental Biology
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International audience. Echinoderms, a sister group of chordates, is a group of exclusively marine animals. TheEchinodermata is an ancient phylum dating to at least 450 million years old and includingmore than 10,000 extant species present throughout the world’s oceans. The modernechinoderms belong to five classes: Echinoidea (e.g., sea urchins and sand dollars),Asteroidea (e.g., starfishes), Ophiuroidea (e.g., brittle stars), Holothuroidea (e.g., seacucumbers) and Crinoidea (e.g., sea lilies and feather stars).Sea urchin represents a well-established marine model in biological sciences. This chapterprovides a general description of echinoderms and focuses on the significant advances in celland developmental biology that the study of sea urchins has made possible. During the lastdecade, many genomic data concerning echinoderms and sea urchins in particular havebecome available. These new molecular tools have facilitated gene regulation analysis duringdevelopment and have boosted the possibilities offered by sea urchins as experimentalmodels.