Preface

Summary

This handbook of laboratory exercises was first conceived at the third Congress of the Spanish Society of Developmental Biology held in Málaga, Spain, in 2001. At the time, Professor Antonio García-Bellido suggested including collaborators from the United States and the rest of Europe to give the project a more international scope. The resulting book is a handbook intended to provide a bridge between top scientific researchers and practical laboratories taught at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. Each chapter introduces a short, inexpensive, and, for the most part, straightforward laboratory project designed to be carried out by students in a standard lab environment. The book uses some of the most popular and best studied model organisms to examine the processes of development. Each chapter is written by specialists in the field describing, in most instances, original pioneering experiments that profoundly impacted the field. The book also demonstrates a historical bridge from classical embryological concepts, using Aristotle and Driesch's entelechia concept (Driesch, 1908) (Chapters 2 and 15) or morphogenetic gradient concept ((i.e. Wolpert, 1969) Chapters 1 and 16) – to modern cellular, genetic and molecular analyses of development, such as homeotic genes (Chapters 11 and 20), compartmentalization (Chapter 14), or cell–cell interactions (Chapter 2, 13, and 22). In addition, the high-impact techniques of vertebrate cloning (Section IX) and Embryonic Stem Cells (Section X), as well as the emerging discipline of Evolution and Development (Evo–Devo, Section XI), are also considered.