Keeping cells separated in well-defined domains is essential for development. A new computational-experimental study elucidates the physical mechanisms that establish and maintain the dorsal-ventral compartment boundary in the Drosophila wing disc and demonstrates the increasing value of computer simulations in developmental biology.

This is a reprint of an article printed in the February – April issue (2005) of Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive / Current Psychology of Cognition, volume 23 (1 – 2), pp 3 – 33. Motion perception and autistic spectrum disorder 2 Abstract Recent evidence has indicated that some children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced ability to detect visual motion. The data suggest that this...

Awareness of children who experience unexpected difficulty in the acquisition of motor skills has increased dramatically over the last twenty years. Although the positing of a distinct syndrome has proven seminal in provoking further questions, several basic terminological problems remain unresolved. In this paper, we conduct a component analysis of the three, principal competing labels for thi...

One of the greatest challenges instructors face is getting students to connect with the subject in a manner that encourages them to learn. In this essay, we describe the redesign of our Developmental Biology course to foster a deeper connection between students and the field of developmental biology. In our approach, we created a community of scientific practice focused on the investigation of ...

One of the most persistent questions in comparative developmental biology concerns whether there are general rules by which ontogeny and phylogeny are related. Answering this question requires conceptual and analytic approaches that allow biologists to examine a wide range of developmental events in well-structured phylogenetic contexts. For evolutionary biologists, one of the most dominant app...

Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD), also called Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), are defined in terms of abnormalities in social and communication development in the presence of marked repetitive behaviour and narrow interests (APA, 1994). The DSM-IV (APA, 1994) and ICD-10 (WHO, 1993) provide diagnostic criteria for autism and related disorders such as Asperger syndrome (AS), Rett’s, and c...

The aim of the present review is to provide a comprehensive explanation of Turing reaction-diffusion systems in sufficient detail to allow readers to perform numerical calculations themselves. The reaction-diffusion model is widely studied in the field of mathematical biology, serves as a powerful paradigm model for self-organization and is beginning to be applied to actual experimental systems...

22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11 DS) is a multisystemic condition that may also include neuropsychiatric disorders. We present a case of a 15-year-old boy that was evaluated for social difficulties, and anxiety with the above genetic abnormality. Clinical features were rather complex as different neuropsychiatric symptoms emerged from assessment and clinical evaluation. As a result we propose t...

Pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) are characterized by slow, limited and atypical developmental processes with onset in the early years of life. The condition leads on to disabilities in virtually all the psychological and behavioral sectors with prominent disturbances in social, communicative and cognitive spheres. PDDs include the prototypic Childhood autism, Rett’s syndrome, Childhood...