REVIEW article
Front. Endocrinol.
Sec. Experimental Endocrinology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2025.1614439
This article is part of the Research TopicFunction of hormones, their receptors and binding proteinsView all 5 articles
Thyroid hormone receptor subtype-specific function in controlling organ-specific developmental timing and rate during Xenopus development
Provisionally accepted
Yun-Bo Shi1*
Yuta Tanizaki2- 1National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, United States
- 2The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tōkyō, Japan
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Thyroid hormone (T3) is essential for vertebrate development as animals fail to develop into adults in the absence of T3. T3 is particularly critical for postembryonic development. This is a period around birth in mammals when most organs mature as plasma T3 level peaks. Unlike embryogenesis, postembryonic development has not been well-studied in mammals due to the difficulty to manipulate mammalian embryos and neonates. In contrast, anuran metamorphosis involves drastic transformations of essentially every organ/tissue of a tadpole and can be easily manipulated externally without maternal influence. In addition, most changes during metamorphosis resemble organ-maturation during postembryonic mammalian development.Thus, metamorphosis offers a unique and highly advantageous opportunity for studying postembryonic vertebrate development. Studies on the metamorphosis of Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis, two highly related species have offered significant insights on the function of thyroid hormone receptors in development. Here we will review some of these studies, with particular emphasis on recent genetic and genome-wide molecular analyses in the diploid species Xenopus tropicalis, that support a dual function model of TR, involving distinct, organ-specific roles of TRα and TRβ, the only known TR genes in all vertebrates.
Keywords: Xenopus laevis, Xenopus tropicalis, developmental timing, metamorphosis, thyroid hormone receptor, Chromatin remodeling, Transcriptional regulation
Received: 18 Apr 2025; Accepted: 23 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shi and Tanizaki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yun-Bo Shi, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, United States
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