Latest Gastrulation Stories

An international team of scientists using a new X-ray method recorded the internal structure and cell movement inside a living frog embryo in greater detail than ever before. This result showcases a new method to advance biological research and the search for new treatments for genetic diseases. Scientists at Northwestern University and the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Germany, in collaboration with the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne...

Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute An embryo is an amazing thing. From just one initial cell, an entire living, breathing body emerges, full of working cells and organs. It comes as no surprise that embryonic development is a very carefully orchestrated process—everything has to fall into the right place at the right time. Developmental and cell biologists study this very thing, unraveling the molecular cues that determine how we become human. “One of the first, and arguably...

Scientists have found that the gut endoderm has a significant role in propagating the information that determines whether organs develop in the stereotypical left-right pattern. Their findings are published 6 March 2012 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology. Superficially, we appear bilaterally symmetrical. Nonetheless, the stereotypical placement of our organs reveals a stereotypical internal asymmetry. For example, the heart is located on the left, while the liver is located on...

Caltech researchers discover a genomic control system that regulates gut formation in sea-urchin embryosFor all animals, development begins with the embryo. It is here that uniform cells divide and diversify, and blueprints are laid for future structures, like skeletal and digestive systems. Although biologists have known for some time that signaling processes"”messages that tell a cell to express certain genes so as to become certain parts of these structures"”exist at this stage, there...

Avian embryos could join the list of model organisms used to study a specific type of cell migration called epiboly, thanks to the results of a study published this month in the journal Developmental Dynamics. The new study provides insights into the mechanisms of epiboly, a developmental process involving mass movement of cells as a sheet, which is linked with medical conditions that include wound healing and cancer.The study, published online on March 15, explains how epithelial cells...

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have successfully attached imaging probes to glycans "“ the sugar molecules that are abundant on the surfaces of living cells "“ in the embryos of zebrafish less than seven hours after fertilization. Glycans are key regulators of the processes that guide cell development, and zebrafish are a top vertebrate model organism of embryogenesis....

Clusters of mouse embryonic stem cells called embryoid bodies more closely approximate true embryos in organization and structure than previously thought, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Harnessing the signals that influence the cells' fate may help researchers more accurately direct the differentiation of embryonic stem cells for use in therapy. The researchers found that embryoid bodies have hallmarks of gastrulation -- a remarkable developmental...