Fig. 9

Scenario of emergence/losses of the PCP members during animal evolution. The emergences (green arrows), duplications (blue arrows) and secondary losses (red arrows) of PCP genes support Ctenophora as the sister group of all other metazoans (9 secondary gene losses, SGL) whereas other scenarios are less parsimonious (Additional file 2). None of these nine potential gene losses can be avoid in the other scenario proposed in the literature. Abbreviations. dsh/dvl, dishevelled; fmi, flamingo; fuz, fuzzy; fzd, frizzled; in, inturned; invs, inversin; pktesL, prickle-testin like; stbm, strabismus; tes, testin and vang, van gogh