ust as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms. So too do different species. They age at their own rates. Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce before their ephemeral food source disappears. While creatures like humans mature slowly over decades, in part because building a large. Complex brain requires it. And at the very beginning of an embryo’s life. Small tweaks in the timing of when. And how different tissues develop can dramatically alter an organism’s form — a mechanism that evolution exploits in creating new species. However, what sets the tempo of an organism’s growth has remained a mystery. “Our knowledge of what controls developmental timing has really lagged behind other areas in developmental biology
A Neuron Keeps Time
More than a decade ago, Vanderhaeghen Phone Number List did an experiment that laid the foundation for modern studies. About how developmental tempo is kept. The neurobiologist was in his Belgian lab growing stem. Cells in petri dishes and observing how long they took to mature from cellular blank slates. To full-fledged neurons connecting. And communicating with others. He thought he might find clues to the origin and evolution of the human brain by comparing these mouse and human stem cells primed to become neurons. The first thing he noticed was that mouse stem cells differentiated into mature brain cells in about a week — more quickly than human stem cells, which took their time growing over three to four months.
How to Grow a Spine
One of the classic models for studying Database USA the tempo of embryonic development is the patterning of the spine. All vertebrates have a spine composed of a string of vertebral segments, but species vary in their number and size. A natural question therefore arises about. The developmental mechanisms that give rise to this essential vertebrate feature. And its many variations throughout the animal kingdom. In 1997, the developmental biologist Olivier Pourquié, now at Harvard Medical School, first uncovered a molecular oscillator called a segmentation clock that drives the mechanism that patterns the vertebrate spine.
