There is a natural curiosity about how organisms give rise to offspring like themselves through a series of reproducible developmental events and how, once mature, these offspring mate and continue the process giving rise the next generation. In the mid-1800s investigators started using gametes and embryos to explore this process. Although the observations and experimental approaches changed over time, embryologists and developmental biologists after them, sought understanding of development and inheritance through the study of gametes and embryos. It is argued here that in their quests to understand these processes embryologists made major conceptual advances that were seminal to the origins of genetics and to the origins of molecular biology. Furthermore these advances derived from the distinct perspective of those investigators with focused interest on the development of the organism. In this essay fundamental discoveries that originated with the sea urchin embryo as an experimental system are used to illustrate this position. The sea urchin has a long and uninterrupted history as a model organism that helped prepare the ground for the emergence of genetics and contributed important aspects to understanding of the central dogma of molecular biology. As molecular biology came of age new concepts and technology of the discipline were transformative for developmental biology and to this day the reciprocal inductive interactions between molecular biology and developmental biology continue to revitalize each other.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2011.06.021 | DOI Listing |
Blood
January 2025
IDIBAPS, Barcelona, Spain.
Previous studies have reported that chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) shows a de novo chromatin activation pattern as compared to normal B cells. Here, we explored whether the level of chromatin activation is related to the clinical behavior of CLL. We identified that in some regulatory regions, increased de novo chromatin activation is linked to clinical progression whereas, in other regions, it is associated with an indolent course.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJAMA Psychiatry
January 2025
Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry, Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Mölndal, Sweden.
Importance: Depressive symptoms are associated with cognitive decline in older individuals. Uncertainty about underlying mechanisms hampers diagnostic and therapeutic efforts. This large-scale study aimed to elucidate the association between depressive symptoms and amyloid pathology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCancer J
January 2025
From the Department of Radiation Oncology, Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbus, OH.
There has been a significant paradigm shift in the clinical management of lower-grade glioma patients given the recent updates to the 2021 World Health Organization classification along with long-term results from randomized phase III clinical trials. As a result, we are now better able to diagnose and assign patients to the most appropriate treatment course. This review provides a comprehensive summary of the most robust and reliable molecular biomarkers for adult lower-grade gliomas and discusses current challenges facing this patient population that future correlative biology studies combined with advancements in technologies could help overcome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Phys Chem Lett
January 2025
Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Vladimir Prelog Weg 2, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Relaxation-induced dipolar modulation enhancement (RIDME) is a pulse EPR experiment originally designed to determine distances between spin labels. However, RIDME has several features that make it an efficient tool in a number of "nonconventional" applications, away from the original purpose of this pulse experiment. RIDME appears to be an interesting experiment to probe longitudinal electron spin dynamics, e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Exp Med Biol
January 2025
Department of Biological Sciences, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye.
Primary familial brain calcification (PFBC) is a rare, progressive central nervous system (CNS) disorder without a cure, and the current treatment methodologies primarily aim to relieve neurological and psychiatric symptoms of the patients. The disease is characterized by abnormal bilateral calcifications in the brain, however, our mechanistic understanding of the biology of the disease is still limited. Determining the roles of the specific cell types and molecular mechanisms involved in the pathophysiological processes of the disease is of great importance for the development of novel and effective treatment methodologies.
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