In April 2011, researchers from diverse background met at the Gulbenkian Institute (Oeiras, Portugal) to discuss the emerging input of biophysics into the field of developmental biology. The scope of the workshop was to bring together scientists working in different model systems and to discuss some of the most recent advances towards understanding how physical forces affect embryonic developme...

“Highlights” calls attention to exciting advances in developmental biology that have recently been reported in Developmental Dynamics. Development is a broad field encompassing many important areas. To reflect this fact, the section spotlights significant discoveries that occur across the entire spectrum of developmental events and problems: from new experimental approaches, to novel interpreta...

The conference will address the apparent paradox of how the brains of different species can be both build on common principles of morphogenesis and differ in shape and connexions in selected areas, resulting in a large variety of behaviours and adaptation. The speakers will cover a wide range of topic from comparative developmental biology to analysis of behaviours and pathologies of the nervou...

Pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems is of great importance in surface micropatterning [Grzybowski et al., Soft Matter 1, 114 (2005)], self-organization of cellular micro-organisms [Schulz et al., Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 55, 105 (2001)], and in developmental biology [Barkai et al., FEBS Journal 276, 1196 (2009)]. In this work, we apply the lattice Boltzmann method to study pattern form...

Mechanisms of lineage choice represent a challenging problem in developmental biology. Recent studies have shown that different T-cell receptor signals can affect CD4 or CD8 lineage choice. Thus, all the ingredients for instructive mechanisms of lineage fate are in place but other mechanisms cannot be completely ruled out.

Some aspects of pattern formation in developing embryos can be described by nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations. An important class of these models accounts for diffusion and degradation of a locally produced single chemical species. At long times, solutions of such models approach a steady state in which the concentration decays with distance from the source of production. We present analyt...

The need for a phylogenetic framework is becoming appreciated in many areas of biology. Such a framework has found limited use in developmental studies. Our current research program is therefore directed to applying comparative and phylogenetic methods to developmental data. In this paper, we examine the concepts underlying this work, discuss potential difficulties, and identify some solutions....

Understanding development is relevant to understanding evolution because developmental processes structure the expression of phenotypic variation upon which natural selection acts. Advances in developmental biology are fueling a new synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology, but it remains unclear how to use developmental information that largely derives from a few model organisms to ...

Welcome to this special focus section of CBE—Life Sciences Education. A large portion of this issue deals with aspects of teaching and learning in a particular subdiscipline of the life sciences: developmental biology. The field of developmental biology has progressed rapidly over the past two decades. The modern synthesis of molecular and genetic approaches in model organisms, comparative and ...