The Power of Simplicity: Sea Urchin Embryos as in Vivo Developmental Models for Studying Complex Cell-to-cell Signaling Network Interactions

The overall goal of these experiments is to illustrate the advantages that simple organisms offer in the study of complex interactions among gene regulatory networks that direct developmental processes.This methodology can help answer key questions in evolutionary and developmental biology, such as how signaling pathways govern cell fate specification along the major embryonic axes in metazoans.One of the main advantages of this methodology is it can be used to efficiently characterize the signaling pathways and the gene regulatory networks that they activate in an in vivo developmental context.Demonstrating this procedure will be Marina Martinez-Bartolom