Developmental Biology covers all aspects of biochemistry in a nutshell; many key discoveries in areas such as signal transduction, cell migration or cell-to-cell communication were made analyzing embryonic development.

This lecture will provide an overview on the basic concepts of developmental biology. How does an embryo develop? How is the genetic information retrieved and interpreted? How is this information transferred to cellular signaling leading to coordinated growth?

Furthermore it will introduce to the methods used in developmental biology, from the generation of animal models to their molecular analysis.

The lecture will also span from development to regeneration and degeneration in adult life; which developmental principles are redeployed, why do they sometimes fail? 

To participate send an E-mail to:   sigmar.stricker@fu-berlin.de

The lecture and seminar in combination count as 5LP (Wahlbereich Biochemie)

One of the fundamental themes in developmental biology is the differentiation of specific organs or structures from undifferentiated progenitor cells. The first step by which this is accomplished is called patterning, where the cells that will later contribute to a specific organ are specified. These cells, mostly under the influence of growth factors, start to differentiate to progenitors of a certain tissue type, then form the initial organ anlage (organogenesis) and then may further differentiate to the various cell types found in a particular organ. Thereby the cells adopt characteristics that can be used to identify them (thus assess their tissue identity, the stage of differentiation and predict their prospective fate). These characteristics can be the morphology / shape of the cell or the production of a specialized extracellular matrix that both can be made visible by simple histological staining procedures. A precise way to characterize cellular differentiation events is to monitor the expression of genes that are characteristic for a specific stage of differentiation (“marker genes”) or to analyze the expression of the respective proteins by immunolabeling.

In this practical course you will analyze development of the skeleton, the muscles and of fat. Skeletal development will be visualized by performing whole-mount skeletal preparations that allow a global overview on skeletal patterning in the embryo and by performing histological analysis. You will analyze fat development by whole-body lipid staining, and muscle development via immunolabeling on tissue sections. In parallel you will perform whole-mount in-situ hybridization on mouse embryos in early stages of development to gain an overview on the emergence of different tissue lines (muscle, skeleton).