The people behind the papers – Agnès Roure and Sébastien Darras

In animals, species-specific organs and nervous systems are patterned from the developing neuroectoderm by conserved canonical Wnt signals. However, how these developmental trajectories diverged through evolution is unclear. Sébastien Darras and colleagues' new study on neuroectoderm patterning in ascidian embryos shows that the conserved Wnt signals elicit divergent molecular responses between species, suggesting that neuroectoderm patterning evolved at a molecular level. To learn more about how this research unfolded and the people behind it, we talked to first author Agnès Roure and corresponding author Sébastien Darras, Group Leader at Banyuls-sur-Mer Ocean Observatory in Sorbonne, France.