Related topics: brain · embryonic stem cells

Lipid metabolism controls brain development

Neural stem cells are not only responsible for early brain development—they remain active for an entire lifetime. They divide and continually generate new nerve cells and enable the brain to constantly adapt to new demands. ...

Understanding congenital heart defects, one chicken at a time

Approximately 10 percent of infants are born with a congenital heart defect, with one of the most common being persistent truncus arteriosus—a hole in the heart. In a healthy baby, deoxygenated blood is pumped through a ...

The genetic secret of night vision

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the vertebrate eye is its retina. Surprisingly, the sensitive portions of the photoreceptor cells are found on the hind side of the retina, meaning that light needs to travel ...

Climate crisis: We are the system that needs to change

Climate change no longer seems just a future threat. In 2019, major fires in Australia, Russia and California burned over 13.5 million hectares of land—an area four times greater than the size of Belgium. Major floods and ...

How moon jellyfish get about

With their translucent bells, moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) move around the oceans in a very efficient way. Scientists at the University of Bonn have now used a mathematical model to investigate how these cnidarians manage ...

Research identifies earlier origin of neural crest cells

Neural crest cells—embryonic cells in vertebrates that travel throughout the body and generate many cell types—have been thought to originate in the ectoderm, the outermost of the three germ layers formed in the earliest ...

Embryo's early development revealed in a dish

During embryonic development, the entire nervous system, the skin and the sensory organs emerge from a single sheet of cells known as the ectoderm. While there have been extensive studies of how this sheet forms all these ...

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