Yutaka Satou

The paper traces the fate of tail bud cells in amphioxus, showing they generate neural tube, notochord, and somites, supporting the hypothesis that ancestral chordates had multipotent tail bud cells.

This study identifies antenna cells in ascidian larvae as gravity-sensing neurons by ablating them and observing loss of upward swimming behavior.

The paper compares scRNA-seq and snRNA-seq in Praesagittifera naikaiensis, finding snRNA-seq better recovers neural transcripts and reduces symbiont reads.

The paper identifies a tripartite neural plate border in ascidian embryos, suggesting it was present in the last common ancestor of vertebrates and tunicates.

The paper identifies Gata.a, Tbx21, and Klf6/7 as cooperative regulators of zygotic genome activation in ascidian embryos, controlling ~80% of zygotically activated genes.

The paper establishes and maintains genetically controlled, closed ascidian colonies to improve experimental reproducibility in non-model organisms.

The paper identifies a master regulatory loop in ascidian muscle cells that controls both spatial and temporal gene expression patterns.

The paper identifies ascidian embryonic cells with properties similar to vertebrate neural-crest cells and neuromesodermal progenitors, suggesting ancestral cell types in the last common ancestor of ascidians and vertebrates.

The paper shows that transcription factors controlling cell fate also regulate cell cycle genes like Cdkn1.b and Myc, linking cell differentiation and division in ascidian embryos.

This study maps the molecular lineage of chordate embryogenesis using single-cell transcriptomics in Ciona savignyi, identifying 47 cell types and revealing fate determination mechanisms.