developmental biology – Quanta Magazine

A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity

Claudia Dreifus — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:16:55 +0000

In Cassandra Extavour’s office at Harvard University hangs a placard with a painted rainbow flag and a friendly invitation. “You are welcome here,” it reads. “I have it up because I think it’s important to let people see your identities, especially when those identities are not well represented,” explained Extavour, an evolutionary geneticist who in 2014 became the first Black woman to win tenure...

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What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells

Viviane Callier — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:54:57 +0000

Just 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’...

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Why Insect Memories May Not Survive Metamorphosis

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:38:54 +0000

On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.

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‘Embryo Models’ Challenge Legal, Ethical and Biological Concepts

Philip Ball — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 14:49:58 +0000

In April, researchers in China reported that they had initiated pregnancies in monkeys through a procedure seemingly much like in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which embryos created in a dish were implanted in the uteruses of cynomolgus monkeys. There seemed nothing remarkable about that — except that this was not genuine IVF, because the embryos had not been produced by fertilization.

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How 3D Changes in the Genome Turned Sharks Into Skates

Viviane Callier — Tue, 30 May 2023 13:44:50 +0000

The marine creatures called skates skim along the sea bottom, rippling their winglike pectoral fins to propel themselves and to stir up small creatures hiding in the sand. Their unusual flattened body plan makes them one of the oddest families of fish in the sea, and it seems even odder that they evolved from streamlined, sharklike carnivores that swam about 285 million years ago.

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