Editorial: New Approaches in Chordate and Vertebrate Evolution and Development

New Approaches in Chordate and Vertebrate Evolution and DevelopmentConsisting of three lineages-cephalochordates (amphioxus), urochordates (tunicates) and vertebrates (including us, humans) (Figure 1), the monophyletic group of chordate animals is defined by the presence, at some stage of their life cycle, of a set of unique and conserved morphological features: a dorsal hollow nerve cord with a notochord just ventral to it, pharyngeal slits and a post-anal tail.Moreover, the last common ancestor of chordates likely possessed a segmented muscular system along the main body axis (Satoh, 2016).Despite these synapomorphies, chordates have largely diversified since their origin around 600 million years ago, especially vertebrates, one of the most successful animal groups on our planet.The evolution of a myriad of morphological novelties (e.g., paired limbs, jaws) are behind chordate and vertebrate diversification since they permitted the adaptation of new species to a vast range of ecological niches.Two processes are particularly relevant to chordate evolutionary success: the formation of the chordate body plan, and the origin of vertebrate traits.Traditionally, developmental biology and genetics have relied on the use of a handful of model animals (mostly jawed vertebrates like mouse, chicken, frog and fish and few invertebrate animals such as the ascidians Ciona and Halocynthia), offering a very narrow taxonomic range to tackle these two points.Although evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) studies soon attempted to increase the taxon sampling, these were impaired by the lack of accessible functional genomics techniques readily available for emerging model animals.Consequently, most of the early molecular genetics' studies in the field of chordate evo-devo consisted of the analysis of a single or a limited number of genes in few species.Therefore, and despite their importance, the mechanisms underlying the origin and evolution of both ancestral traits and morphological novelties of chordates have remained largely elusive.The recent surge and exponential growth of genome assemblies available from a wider set of animal models, together with the availability of the most recent technological innovations in genome editing and whole genome scale high throughput expression and regulation analyses are starting to provide answers to some of the long-standing chordate evo-devo questions.With this in mind, we present this Frontiers Research Topic, entitled "New Approaches in Chordate and Vertebrate Evolution and Development," consisting of 23 manuscripts, including 14 original research articles and 5 reviews together with reports in several other formats.This fantastic Research Topic introduces multidisciplinary and integrative approaches that, by using the most recent state-ofthe-art technologies in genomics, molecular biology, imaging and bioinformatics are contributing towards a better understanding of the mechanistic basis of chordate phenotypic diversity.

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