Genome-wide proximity ligation assays allow the identification of chromatin contacts at unprecedented resolution. Several studies reveal that mammalian chromosomes are composed of topological domains (TDs) in sub-mega base resolution, which appear to be conserved across cell types and to some extent even between organisms. Identifying topological domains is now an important step toward understa...

It has been 55 years since the elucidation of the structure of DNA, suggesting an elegantly simple means for its self-replication. Who would have dreamed in 1953 that it would take longer for us to understand DNA replication than it would for us to uncover the basic rules of animal development? Without question, the mechanisms regulating where and when DNA replication initiates in the cells of ...

Since October of 1987, Jacques Mulnard has been Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. He arrived as a student in 1939 and achieved a brilliant record in his medical studies. The difficult circumstances of the war were soon to reveal his attachment to his Institution and his exceptional qualities as a pedagogue and humanist. During his t...

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During formation of the secondary palate in mammalian embryos, two vertically oriented palatal shelves rapidly elevate into a horizontal position above the tongue, meet at the midline, and fuse to form a single entity. Previous observations suggested that elevation occurs by a simple 90° rotation of the palatal shelves. More recent findings showed that the presumptive midline epithelial cells a...

Construction of a mammalian artificial chromosome (MAC) will develop our understanding of the requirements for normal chromosome maintenance, replication and segregation while offering the capacity for introducing genes into cells. Construction of MACs with telomere, centromere and replication function has been approached by two methods. The 'top down' strategy uses artificially induced chromos...

INTRODUCTION D E S P I T E recent successes with the cultivation of mouse and rabbit eggs (references in Austin, 1961, pp. 144-7) techniques for the cultivation of post-implantation mammalian embryos have not hitherto advanced beyond those devised in the 1930's. Jolly & Lieure (1938) obtained development of rat and guinea-pig embryos explanted into homologous serum at stages between primitive s...

Evolutionary Analysis of Mammalian ACE2 and the Key Residues Involved in Binding to Spike Protein Revealed Potential SARS-CoV-2 Hosts

Background: Regulation of gene expression in mammalian embryos is not completely known. Pre-implantation embryos need maternal RNA and proteins synthesized during oogenesis, to regulate development before mater-embryo transition, as the grown oocyte and the 1-cell zygote are transcriptionally silent. There are some oocyte-specific genes called maternal effect genes which may account for this ea...