Developmental biology最新文献

FüR DARWIN: written in the early 1860s by the German zoologist and Darwinist Fritz Müller, articulates many of the concepts foundational to the contemporary field of evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. Working on the Brazilian coast offered him refuge from both religious conservatism and the "great market" of Prussian academic science. Here, Müller studied the developmental stages of crustacea and used these meticulous observations to critique the extant literature on classification. In so doing, he both provided evidence for Darwin's theory, and extended it to larval forms. In this essay, we situate Für Darwin, published in English as Facts and Arguments for Darwin in 1869, within the landscape of nineteenth century biology. We propose that Für Darwin is a remarkably prophetic text in the history of developmental biology given its sharp insight into the relationship between development and evolution (ontogeny and phylogeny), its many contributions to crustacean biology, and Müller's deep appreciation of the danger of scientific dogma.

Germ cell specification is an essential step in sexually reproducing animals. Echinoderms possess diverse representatives of the main mechanisms that result in this cell fate determination. Sea urchins use an inherited mechanism, whereas sea stars rely on the ancestral, induced mechanism. Blimp1 (B lymphocyte-induced maturation protein-1) is a transcriptional regulator reported in mice to function in the induction of germline cells. Here, we identify the dynamic function of Blimp1 during development in a comparative approach using the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (inherited germline) and the batstar, Patiria miniata (induced germline). We found that Blimp1 is important for germ cell specification in both species and that multiple Blimp1 isoforms result from differential mRNA splicing in each animal. Each isoform of Blimp1 functions in distinct expression of germline determinants, including Vasa and Nanos. These results show that Blimp1 is a conserved and key regulator for germ cell specification, but divergent in function as a result of post-transcriptional modification. Overall, we conclude that Blimp1 is an intersectional node in diverse germline specification strategies and supports the concept that differential mRNA splicing is an essential mechanism in germ cell formation.

The availability of fertilised chicken eggs and the accessibility and rapid development of the avian embryo, have been utilised in biomedical scientific research to make fundamental discoveries including of developmental processes that are common to all vertebrates, advances in teratology, the understanding of tumour growth and metastasis, angiogenesis, cancer drug assessment and vaccine development as well as advances in understanding avian specific biology. However, recent innovations in chicken transgenesis, genome engineering and surrogate host technology in chickens have only been utilised in a few of these fields of research, specifically some areas of developmental biology, avian sex determination and immunology. To understand why other biomedical fields have not adopted modern chicken transgenic tools, we investigated the non-technical summaries of projects granted in the UK under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 between 2017-2023 to assess when and how chicken embryos are used in research, and if they were considered as a Replacement model for other species.

Life history emerges as developmental processes play out over the lifespan of an organism, and the concept of life history intersects with evolutionary biology, ecology, demographics and sociology. Here, we briefly outline the interdisciplinary concept of life history, surveying some of the diversity in life history transitions across animals, and exploring these transitions as genetically and hormonally-regulated developmental processes. We review some of the data suggesting that social structures are capable of shifting the timing of human life history transitions, with implications for lifetime health outcomes. Social and structural inequity in contemporary society tends to accelerate developmental life history processes, which can create temporal and physiological pressures that intersect with and amplify disadvantage. Focusing specifically on the experiences of Black women in the U.S., we examine the impacts of inequity on the timing of four developmental life history transitions: birth, puberty, first reproduction and menopause. We identify some of the important intersections between developmental biology, sociology and public health, and we argue that these disciplinary intersections can be introduced in many developmental biology classrooms. We propose some pedagogical frameworks designed to help students grow an awareness of how developmental processes can be affected by social inequities, with the ultimate goal of stimulating more cross-disciplinary conversations about life histories and their intersections with social structures.