Molecular Development

Introduction

This page is a link to many different resources related to Molecular Development. In current years we have turned from wanting to merely describe the events of embryogenesis, to a desire to understand the mechanisms of development.

Fly Heads of wildtype and antennapedia (Hox) mutant (Images Dr. Rudi Turner)

What is remarkable, given our biological diversity, is the strong evolutionary conservation of developmental mechanisms. This has been a boon in allowing the use of many (easier) model systems such as the genetist's tool the fruitfly, and the worm, frog, chicken, zebrafish and mouse (see other embryos page).

A continuing theme also seems to be the reuse of signals at different times and places within the embryo, for diiferent jobs. This has given rise to the concept of "switches" which by themselves may contain no "information" but to activate other genes or switches. Finally, you can imagine that of our 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes, a large number of these may only be expressed during development or if reused, have a completely different role in the mature animal.

In terms of molecular mechanisms, the field of epigenetics has begun to florish with some recent important findings.

Glossary Links

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Cite this page: Hill, M.A. (2024, June 2) Embryology Molecular Development. Retrieved from https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Molecular_Development

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