Powered flight was first mastered by insects, many millions of years ago. Now, studies with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster reveal the critical role of a conserved transcription factor in programming the development of specialized flight muscles.

In this issue, we present Developmental Biology Select in which we discuss recent papers that unravel the parts played by morphogens in diverse processes including stem cell maintenance and cellular differentiation. The new studies suggest that in stem cells, global regulators of transcription and RNA stability could work in parallel with morphogens to control self renewal and differentiation. ...

Translational developmental biology is a growing approach to studying biological phenomena that explicitly aims to develop medical therapies. When discussing the generation of new therapies it is often argued that they will emerge as a ?translation? from ?fundamental biology.? Although translational research is not a new term, ?translational developmental biology? has been steadily gaining popu...

Developmental biology (including embryology) is proposed as "the stem cell of biological disciplines." Genetics, cell biology, oncology, immunology, evolutionary mechanisms, neurobiology, and systems biology each has its ancestry in developmental biology. Moreover, developmental biology continues to roll on, budding off more disciplines, while retaining its own identity. While its descendant di...