background: the rodent somatosensory barrel cortex is an ideal model to examine the effect of experience-dependent plasticity on developing brain circuitry. sensory deprivation such as whisker deprivation may affect neuroanatomical aspects of the brain during developmental processes. the present study designed to investigate the possible effects of whisker deprivation on the morphometric charac...

Vulnerable periods during the development of the nervous system are sensitive to environmental insults because they are dependent on the temporal and regional emergence of critical developmental processes (i.e., proliferation, migration, differentiation, synaptogenesis, myelination, and apoptosis). Evidence from numerous sources demonstrates that neural development extends from the embryonic pe...

MOTIVATION Spatio-temporal regulation of gene expression is an indispensable characteristic in the development processes of all animals. 'Master switches', a central set of regulatory genes whose states (on/off or activated/deactivated) determine specific developmental fate or cell-fate specification, play a pivotal role for whole developmental processes. In this study on genome-wide integrativ...

What are the essential properties of human intelligence, currently unparalleled in its power relative to other biological forms and relative to artificial forms of intelligence? We suggest that answering this question depends critically on understanding developmental process. This paper considers three principles potentially essential to building human-like intelligence: the heterogeneity of th...

This paper selectively reviews recent research, especially in the last two years (2012-2014) in preschool, child, and adolescent depression. In particular, attention is paid to developmental epidemiology as well as risk factors and processes that contribute to depression trajectories over time. Emphasis is placed on a developmental psychopathology perspective in which risks are instantiated acr...

Animals differ markedly in their ability to regenerate, yet still little is known about how regeneration evolves. In recent years, important advances have been made in our understanding of animal phylogeny and these provide new insights into the phylogenetic distribution of regeneration. The developmental basis of regeneration is also being investigated in an increasing number of groups, allowi...

* Department of Genetics, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA 2 Departments of Pediatrics and Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA ................................................................................................................................................................

Developmental processes in nature may involve complex changes in the topology, shape, and patterns of growing structures. Processes taking place in one or two dimensions can be visualized as objects in three-dimensional space, obtained by extruding the growing structures along a line or curve representing the progress of time. In this paper, we extend the notion of L-systems with turtle interpr...

Hoxa2 is required for a variety of developmental processes in the branchial arches and in the hindbrain. We have created a Hoxa2 allele that is about 45% as active in transcription as its wild-type counterpart. This allele, together with the Hoxa2 null and wild-type alleles, allowed the generation of embryos developing in the presence of different levels of Hoxa2 activity. Analysis of these emb...

Evolutionary genetics is concerned with natural selection and neutral drift, to the virtual exclusion of almost everything else. In its current focus on DNA variation, it reduces phenotypes to symbols. Varying phenotypes, however, are the units of evolution, and, if we want a comprehensive theory of evolution, we need to consider both the internal and external evolutionary forces that shape the...