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Species
Species Overview
Branchiostoma japonicum is a cephalochordate native to the coastal waters of East Asia, particularly around Japan and China. Like other lancelets, it is a small (4–6 cm), laterally compressed, semi-transparent organism that lives partially buried in sandy or gravelly substrates in shallow marine environments. It retains the ancestral chordate body plan with a persistent notochord, dorsal hollow nerve cord, pharyngeal gill slits, and a post-anal tail throughout its life. It feeds by filter-feeding, drawing water into the pharynx and trapping plankton and organic particles with a mucous net. B. japonicum has been widely used in developmental biology research in East Asia due to its accessibility and its phylogenetic position as a basal chordate. Its embryonic development is relatively simple and rapid, making it suitable for studies of gene expression and body axis formation. The species exhibits sexual reproduction with seasonal spawning, typically in warm months. Compared to B. floridae, B. japonicum has been the subject of extensive transcriptomic and genomic studies in Chinese and Japanese laboratories, contributing to our understanding of chordate evolution, Hox gene clusters, and the transition from invertebrate to vertebrate body plans.
Integrated UMAP Atlas & Gene Explorer
Provisional atlas release
This view is a provisional release built from a public dataset (PMID 34336847) that has not yet completed the LACA annotation pipeline: cell groups are unsupervised Leiden clusters without curated cell-type names, and the embedding was recomputed by LACA (normalize/HVG/PCA/UMAP) without batch correction. Gene search is disabled pending the curated release.
3,141 cells · provisional clusters Loading UMAP for Japanese lancelet…
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