Nature Communications 3: Article number: 1279 (2012); Published: 11 December 2012; Updated: 5 February 2013.

In Fig. 1 and the first paragraph of the Discussion section in this Article, the genus Hydractinia is incorrectly referred to as hydra. The following sentence is correct: ‘Interestingly, the recently identified Pou domain gene from Hydractinia18 appears to have the features of an Oct4/Pou2 precursor gene, as shown in Fig. 1a, suggesting that the common Oct4/Pou2 ancestor could have already existed even before the specification of vertebrates.’. The correct version of Fig. 1 appears below.

figure 1