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Species
Species Overview
Branchiostoma floridae is a small, translucent, blade-shaped cephalochordate found in shallow sandy substrates along the southeastern coast of North America, particularly around Tampa Bay, Florida. Adults typically reach 5–6 cm in length and lack paired fins, jaws, and a true vertebral column. They possess a notochord that extends the full length of the body throughout life, making them a key model organism for studying the evolutionary origins of vertebrates. They are filter feeders, drawing water through the oral hood lined with cirri and trapping food particles in a mucous net secreted by the endostyle, a structure homologous to the vertebrate thyroid gland. Their pharynx contains numerous gill slits used primarily for feeding rather than respiration. The segmented musculature (myomeres) allows for burrowing into sand, where they spend most of their time with only the anterior end protruding. Reproduction is sexual, with external fertilization; gonads are visible as paired, repeated structures along the body wall. The genome of B. floridae was among the first invertebrate deuterostome genomes sequenced and has revealed that it retains a largely unduplicated genome compared to vertebrates, providing critical insight into whole-genome duplication events at the base of vertebrate evolution.
Integrated UMAP Atlas & Gene Explorer
Provisional atlas release
This provisional release contains 80,000 embryo cells from a single published dataset, annotated at germ-layer resolution. Cell-type labels follow the source publication and have not yet been standardized to the LACA cell-type vocabulary. Gene-expression search is unavailable for this release.
80,000 cells · Embryo · provisional annotations Loading UMAP for Florida lancelet…
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