Cleavage pattern, gastrulation, and neurulation in the appendicularian, Oikopleura dioica

The appendicularian, Oikopleura dioica is a chordate. Its life cycle is extremely short--approximately 5 days--and its tadpole shape with a beating tail is retained throughout entire life. The tadpole hatches after 3 h of development at 20 degrees C. Here, we describe the cleavage pattern and morphogenetic cell movements during gastrulation and neurulation. Cleavage showed an invariant pattern. It is basically bilateral but also shows various minor left-right asymmetries starting from the four-cell stage. We observed two rounds of unequal cleavage of the posterior-vegetal B-line cells at the posterior pole. The nature of the unequal cleavages is reminiscent of those in ascidian embryos and suggests the presence of a centrosome-attracting body, a special subcellular structure at the posterior pole. The representation of the cell division pattern in this report will aid the identification of each cell, a prerequisite for clarifying the gene expression patterns in early embryos. Gastrulation started as early as the 32-cell stage and progressed in three phases. By the end of the second phase at the 64-cell stage, every vegetal cell had ingressed into the embryo, and animal cells had covered the entire embryo by epiboly. There was no archenteron formation. In the anterior region, eight A-line cells were aligned as a 2x4 array along the anterior-posterior axis and become internalized during the 64-cell stage. This process was considered to correspond to neurulation. The simple and accelerated development of Oikopleura, nevertheless giving rise to a conserved chordate body plan, is advantageous for studying developmental mechanisms using molecular and genetic approaches and makes this animal the simplest model organism in the phylum Chordata.