File:Bat - adult and fetal limbs.jpg

Limbs of the Adult and Fetal Bats

(A) Left limbs of adult Myotis ricketti. DI, DII, DIII, DIV and DV represent digits I-V of the forelimb;

(B, C) Left limbs of Miniopterus schreibersii fuliginosus in the Fetal Stage as an example of samples used for the Myotis ricketti libraries. Libraries Hand DI and Hand DII-V are constructed from forelimb digit I and digits II-V, respectively.

Library Foot is constructed from hindlimb digits I-V.

Bar = 1 cm in A; bar = 1 mm in B and C.

"bat wings are primarily shaped by elongated digits (digits II-V) that support the wing membranes or dactylopatagia (Figure 1A) [2]. This digit elongation is extreme. For their body length, bats have the longest relative digit lengths with the longest digit (digit III) exceeding the length of the body. However, not all of the forelimb digits are elongated, digit I - the thumb - maintains a short morphology similar to the hindlimb digits and is used to grasp surface or move on the ground (Figure 1)."

Links: Bat Development

Reference

<pubmed>21054883 </pubmed>| BMC Genomics.

Wang et al. BMC Genomics 2010 11:619 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-11-619

© 2010 Wang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Original file name: 1471-2164-11-619-1.jpg