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Shaping up: how vertebrates adjust their digestive system to changing environmental conditions

Shaping up: how vertebrates adjust their digestive system to changing environmental conditions AbstractThe vertebrate gastrointestinal tract is a flexible system that can individually be modified to account for changes in amount and quality of food as well as changes in internal demands. In this paper, I summarise some recent findings and ideas about processes on the level of tissues and cells that allow vertebrates to adjust their intestines to fluctuating conditions. In mammals and birds intestinal flexibility is based on a balance of cell proliferation and cell loss. Maintenance as well as up- and down-regulation of the mucosa involves bio-production or dystrophy of tissue. Both are assumed to be energetically expensive. In contrast, up- and down-regulation of the mucosal epithelium of ectotherm sauropsids is based on configuration changes of the pseudostratified mucosal epithelium. Up-regulation of the mucosa size does not involve cell proliferation, thus it is presumably an energetically cheap process. A comparison of mammals, birds, and ectotherm sauropsids (mainly snakes) allows the development of some new ideas about the historical path of the evolution of gastrointestinal flexibility. Snakes seem to share with other basal tetrapods a phylogenetically plesiomorphic pattern. Birds and mammals have independently evolved new mechanisms that sustain flexibility at a high metabolic level. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Animal Biology Brill

Shaping up: how vertebrates adjust their digestive system to changing environmental conditions

Animal Biology , Volume 53 (3): 13 – Jan 1, 2003

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1570-7555
eISSN
1570-7563
DOI
10.1163/157075603322539444
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThe vertebrate gastrointestinal tract is a flexible system that can individually be modified to account for changes in amount and quality of food as well as changes in internal demands. In this paper, I summarise some recent findings and ideas about processes on the level of tissues and cells that allow vertebrates to adjust their intestines to fluctuating conditions. In mammals and birds intestinal flexibility is based on a balance of cell proliferation and cell loss. Maintenance as well as up- and down-regulation of the mucosa involves bio-production or dystrophy of tissue. Both are assumed to be energetically expensive. In contrast, up- and down-regulation of the mucosal epithelium of ectotherm sauropsids is based on configuration changes of the pseudostratified mucosal epithelium. Up-regulation of the mucosa size does not involve cell proliferation, thus it is presumably an energetically cheap process. A comparison of mammals, birds, and ectotherm sauropsids (mainly snakes) allows the development of some new ideas about the historical path of the evolution of gastrointestinal flexibility. Snakes seem to share with other basal tetrapods a phylogenetically plesiomorphic pattern. Birds and mammals have independently evolved new mechanisms that sustain flexibility at a high metabolic level.

Journal

Animal BiologyBrill

Published: Jan 1, 2003

Keywords: HYPERTROPHY; CELL PROLIFERATION; GASTROINTESTINAL TRACT; HYPERPLASIA; PHENOTYPIC FLEXIBILITY

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