* The author is employed at the United Nations Environment Programme’s Regional Office for Europe. The paper is presented by the author in her personal capacity, however, and opinions expressed in this paper should be attributed to the author. They are not meant to represent the positions or opinions of UNEP or the State Parties to the Framework Convention on the Protection of the Marine Enviro...

The lamprey is the only basal vertebrate in which large-scale gene perturbation analyses are feasible at present. Studies on this unique animal model promise to contribute both to the understanding of the basic neural-crest gene regulatory network architecture, and evolution of the neural crest. In this review, we summarize the currently known regulatory relationships underlying formation of th...

Iran’s security is affected by a broad region that includes the Caspian Basin, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf states, Pakistan, Turkey, and the Middle East. However, an increased focus on the countries of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), as well as Iraq, on the one hand, and with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (including Yemen) on the other, provides a na...

The Caspian Sea is heavily polluted due to industrial and agricultural effluents as well as extraction of oil and gas reserves. Microbial communities can influence the fate of contaminants and nutrients. However, insight into the microbial ecology of the Caspian Sea significantly lags behind other marine systems. Here we describe microbial biomass, diversity and composition in sediments collect...

S U M M A R Y The Rudbar-Tarom earthquake of 1990 June 20 (M0 = 1.4 × 1027 dyn cm), the largest one in Iran over the past 35 yr, was accompanied by a small tsunami in the Caspian Sea, which produced run-ups of up to 2 m, and inundations of 1 km, reaffirming the existence of tsunami hazard along the Caspian shoreline, as suggested by historical reports. We present the results of a field survey, ...

Sensory input to the lamprey central pattern generator (CPG) for locomotion is known to have a significant role in modulating lamprey swimming. Lamprey CPGs are known to have the ability to entrain to a bending stimulus, that is, in the presence of a rhythmic signal, the CPG will change its frequency to match the stimulus frequency. Bending experiments in which the lamprey spinal cord has been ...

Two recently cloned gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) receptors (lamprey GnRH-R-2 and lamprey GnRH-R-3) along with lamprey (l) GnRH-R-1 were shown to share similar structural features and amino acid motifs common to other vertebrate receptors. Here we report on our findings of RNA expression of these three GnRH receptors in the three major life stages (larval, parasitic, and adult phases) o...

The myotome in gnathostome vertebrates, which gives rise to the trunk skeletal muscles, consists of epaxial (dorsal) and hypaxial (ventral) portions, separated by the horizontal myoseptum. The hypaxial portion contains some highly derived musculature that is functionally as well as morphologically well differentiated in all the gnathostome species. In contrast, the trunk muscles of agnathan lam...

The Cyclostomata consists of the two orders Myxiniformes (hagfishes) and Petromyzoniformes (lampreys), and its monophyly has been unequivocally supported by recent molecular phylogenetic studies. Under this updated vertebrate phylogeny, we performed in silico evolutionary analyses using currently available cDNA sequences of cyclostomes. We first calculated the GC-content at four-fold degenerate...