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developmental biology
Monday 1 December 2003
Quantitative approaches
The tissues of a developing embryo are simultaneously patterned, moved and differentiated according to an exchange of information between their constituent cells.
These complex self-organizing phenomena can only be fully understood with quantitative mathematical frameworks that allow specific hypotheses to be formulated and tested.
The quantitative and dynamic imaging of growing embryos at the molecular, cellular and tissue level is the key experimental advance required to achieve this interaction between theory and experiment.
Mathematical modelling has become an invaluable method to integrate quantitative biological information across temporal and spatial scales, serving to connect the activity of regulatory molecules with the morphological development of organisms.
Online textbooks
References
Quantitative approaches in developmental biology. Oates AC, Gorfinkiel N, González-Gaitán M, Heisenberg CP. Nat Rev Genet. 2009 Aug;10(8):517-30. PMID: 19584811
Cañestro C, Yokoi H, Postlethwait JH. Evolutionary developmental biology and genomics. Nat Rev Genet. 2007 Dec;8(12):932-42. PMID: 18007650
Kaltschmidt JA, Martinez Arias A. A new dawn for an old connection: development meets the cell. Trends Cell Biol. 2002 Jul;12(7):316-20. PMID: 12185848