Early development occurs in a highly organized and orchestrated manner and has long attracted the interest of developmental biologists and embryologists. Cell lineage, or the study of the developmental differentiation [4] of a blastomere [5], involves tracing a particular cell ( blastomere [5]) forward from its position in one of the three germ layers [6]. Labeling individual cells within their...

During embryonic development, tissues deform by a succession and combination of morphogenetic processes. Tissue compaction is the morphogenetic process by which a tissue adopts a tighter structure. Recent studies characterized the respective roles of cells' adhesive and contractile properties in tissue compaction. In this review, we formalize the mechanical and molecular principles of tissue co...

A long-standing goal of biology is to map the behavior of all cells during vertebrate embryogenesis. We developed digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy and recorded nuclei localization and movement in entire wild-type and mutant zebrafish embryos over the first 24 hours of development. Multiview in vivo imaging at 1.5 billion voxels per minute provides "digital embryos," tha...

Mushroom bodies (MBs) are the centers for olfactory associative learning and elementary cognitive functions in the arthropod brain. In order to understand the cellular and genetic processes that control the early development of MBs, we have performed high-resolution neuroanatomical studies of the embryonic and post-embryonic development of the Drosophila MBs. In the mid to late embryonic stages...

This paper shows stage- and tissue-specific global demethylation and remethylation occurring during embryonic development. The egg genome is strikingly undermethylated and the sperm genome relatively methylated. Following a loss of genomic methylation during preimplantation development, embryonic and extraembryonic lineages are progressively and independently methylated to different final exten...

Pluripotent stem cells are characterised by continuous self-renewal while maintaining the potential to differentiate into cells of all three germ layers. Regulatory networks of maintaining pluripotency have been described in great detail and, similarly, there is great knowledge on key players that regulate their differentiation. Interestingly, pluripotency has various shades with distinct devel...

In September 2014, over 100 scientists from around the globe gathered at Wotton House near London for the Company of Biologists’ workshop ‘From Stem Cells to Human Development’. The workshop covered diverse aspects of human development, from the earliest stages of embryogenesis to differentiation of mature cell types of all three germ layers from pluripotent cells. In this Meeting Review, we su...

Embryonic stem cell (ESC) pluripotency is maintained by core transcriptional circuits whereby critical factors sustain their own expression while preventing the expression of genes required for differentiation. Thomson et al. (2011) now show that two core components of the pluripotency circuit, Oct4 and Sox2, are also critical for germ layer fate choice.

teratomas are bulky lesions that rarely occur in the head and neck regions.they are composed of tissues from all germ layers with varying degrees of differentiation. they arise from pluripotential stem cells and ectopic embryonic non-germ cells. the most common sites of occurrence in the head and neck are the cervical region and the nasopharynx. three cases of these tumors are reported here tha...

Next to cells, germ layers—the fundamental embryonic cell layers from which tissues and organs form—are the most long-standing units of structural organization of the embryos of multicellular animals (metazoans). First identified in chicken embryos by Pander in 1817, the history of germ layers through the nineteenth century was one of increasing appreciation of their generality and importance: