Cell type innovation at the tips of the animal tree

Understanding how organs originate is challenging due to the twin problems of explaining how new cell types evolve and how collective interactions between cell types arise and become selectively advantageous. Animals are assemblages of organs and cell types of different antiquities, and among the most rapidly and convergently evolving are exocrine glands and their constituent secretory cell types. Such structures have arisen independently thousands of times across the Metazoa, impacting how animals chemically interact with their environments. The recurrent evolution of exocrine systems provides a paradigm for examining how qualitative phenotypic novelties arise from variation at the cellular level. Here, we take a hierarchical perspective, focusing on the evolutionary assembly of novel biosynthetic pathways and secretory cell types, and how both selection and non-adaptive molecular processes may combine to build the complex, modular architectures of many animal glands.