ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Comparative Genomics Centre, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland 4811, Australia. david.miller@jcu.edu.au
Expressed sequence tag analyses of the annelid Pomatoceros lamarckii, recently published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, are consistent with less extensive gene loss in the Lophotrochozoa than in the Ecdysozoa, but it would be premature to generalize about patterns of gene loss on the basis of the limited data available.