Introduction To Molecular Embryology
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Introduction to Molecular Embryology
Author: Jean Brachet
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2012-12-06
Nearly 10 years have elapsed since I finished writing the first edition of Intro duction to Molecular Embryology. During this period, molecular embryology has made great strides forward, but without undergoing a major revolution; there fore, the general philosophy and outline of the book have remained almost un changed. However, all the chapters had to be almost completely rewritten in or der to introduce new facts and to eliminate findings which have lost interest or have been disproved. There was a major gap in the first edition of this book: very little was said about mammalian eggs despite their obvious interest for mankind. Research on mammalian eggs and embryos is so active today that this important topic deserves a full chapter in a book concerned with molecular embryology. Therefore, I am very thankful to my colleague Dr. Henri Alexandre, who has written a chapter on mammalian embryology (Chap. 9) and has prepared all the illustrations for this book.
Introduction to Molecular Embryology
The main questions that embryology has always tried to answer are the following: How can the fertilized egg, which has received a nucleus from the mother and another from the father, give rise to all the organs present in the adult? How is it possible, at a given time of development and in a special region of the embryo, that a limited number of cells can differentiate into muscles or red blood cells? It is the purpose of molecular embryology to answer such questions in terms of the properties of macromolecules. Although we are still very far from obtaining a complete answer, spectacular progress in molecular biology has allowed us to state the same problems in simpler terms. For instance, the word "nucleus" can be replaced by "a set of genes" or still better, by "deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)"; the fertilized egg has, in fact, received equal amounts of paternal and maternal DNA and this constitu ent is really the most important part of the nucleus, since it contains, in its own molecules, all the program for development into an adult. As for the second question, biochemistry tells us that muscle cells would fail to contract and would not display their characteristic structure under the microscope if they did not contain considerable amounts of specific proteins: the so-called "contractile" proteins, actin and myosin.