Gastrulation is characterized by the extensive movements of cells. Fate mapping is used to follow such cell movements as they occur over time, and prospective fate maps have been constructed for several stages of the model organisms used in modern studies in developmental biology. In chick embryos, detailed fate maps have been constructed for both prospective mesodermal and ectodermal cells. Ho...

The location of the pre-hepatic cells which can respond to the inductive influence of the cardiac mesoderm and differentiate to the hepatic epithelium was investigated in quail embryos between the unincubated and 8-somite stages. These cells were found to exist in the whole area of the blastoderm of unincubated and prestreak stages. At the short-streak stage, just before the beginning of gastru...

An experimental study was made of the distribution of the primary hypoblastic cells in the lower layer of the avian blastoderm throughout primitive streak formation and until stage 10 (Hamburger & Hamilton, 1951). The primary hypoblast of stage XIII (Eyal-Giladi & Kochav, 1976) chick blastoderms was exchanged for either an [H3]thymidine-labelled similar chick hypoblast, or a quail primary hypob...

Fig. 1. Axis specification and germ layer formation in the gastrulating mouse embryo. Between embryonic day E3.5 and E6.0, expansion of polar trophectoderm and the inner cell mass gives rise to extraembryonic ectoderm (grey) and the epiblast (blue), respectively. Primitive endoderm at the distal tip differentiates and is displaced to the prospective anterior side to become anterior visceral end...

Stromal-derived factor 1 (SDF-1) is a -CXC- chemokine that plays a critical role in embryonic and adult hematopoiesis, and its specific receptor, CXCR4, has been implicated in stem cell homing. In this study, it is shown that the addition of SDF-1 to long-term cultures (LTCs) of normal human marrow can selectively, reversibly, and specifically block the S-phase entry of primitive quiescent eryt...

Fate maps are required to address questions about the commitment and differentiation of precardiac cells. Here, we report a detailed study of the precardiac cells located at the level of the primitive streak, employing different experiments with a variety of techniques combining double transplantations, microinjections and immunocytochemistry. Most cells of the more rostral segments of the prim...

Archaea have a self-assembling proteinaceous surface (S-) layer as the primary and outermost boundary of their cell envelopes. The S-layer maintains structural rigidity, protects the organism from adverse environmental elements, and yet provides access to all essential nutrients. We have determined the crystal structure of one of the two "homologous" tandem polypeptide repeats that comprise the...

Gastrulation in the mouse embryo involves the active ingression of epiblast cells through the primitive streak and the reassortment of cell populations to the definitive germ layers (Hashimoto and Nakatusji; 1989, Tam and Beddington, 1987; Tam et al., 1993). It is not known how the different populations of presumptive mesodermal and endodermal cells are sorted during germ layer morphogenesis. F...

Scene analysis is a major aspect of perception and continues to challenge machine perception. This paper addresses the scene-analysis problem by integrating a primitive segmentation stage with a model of associative memory. The model is a multistage system that consists of an initial primitive segmentation stage, a multimodule associative memory, and a short-term memory (STM) layer. Primitive s...