The origin of the Drosophila compound eye predates the ancestor of Pancrustacea, the arthropod clade that includes insects and Crustaceans. Recent studies in emerging model systems for pancrustacean development — the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum and water flea Daphnia pulex — have begun to shed light on the evolutionary conservation of transcriptional mechanisms found for the Drosophila compound eye. Here, we discuss the conserved roles of the transcription factors Otd and Pph13, which complement each other in two terminal events of photoreceptor differentiation: rhabdomere morphogenesis and transcriptional default activation of opsin gene expression. The synthesis of these data allows us to frame an evolutionary developmental model of the earliest events that generated the wavelength-specific photoreceptor subtypes of pancrustacean compound eyes.

果蝇复眼的起源早于Pancrustacea的祖先，Pancrustacea是节肢动物进化枝，其中包括昆虫和甲壳类动物。最近出现的针对甲壳动物发育的模型系统的研究-红粉甲虫Tribolium castaneum和水蚤Daphnia pulex- 已开始揭示果蝇转录机制的进化保守性。复眼。在这里，我们讨论了转录因子Otd和Pph13的保守作用，它们在光感受器分化的两个末端事件中相互补充：鼠李糖形态发生和视蛋白基因表达的转录默认激活。这些数据的综合使我们能够构建最早事件的进化发展模型，该模型生成泛壳动物复眼的特定波长光感受器亚型。