Landscapes and embryos : A film from A. Martinez Arias
A trip through some landmarks of Developmental Biology against the background of the Goldberg variations played by Glenn Gould, which evoke the order and harmony of the events that build embryos. The film takes the notion that developmental biologists see the making of the organisms unfolding in the vision of the genes or the cells and grows it through images of the various systems that have been used to understand cell fate specification and morphogenesis. The film introduces you to the world of how cells make embryos starting with the chick embryo, the grand classic of developmental biology. Then it introduces you to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster whose genetics has revealed to us the molecular make up of developmental systems and their cellular basis as well as the homeotic genes, which uncovered one of the most intriguing aspect of conservation in nature, the structure and deployment of the Hox genes. The organization, expression and conservation of these genes across all organisms confirms suspicions from comparative embryology that embryos are intimately related, particularly at their early stages, and that they converge in a stage with an anteroposterior segmentation pattern, a landmark of all organisms from insects to mammals. The film ends up by exploring issues of mammalian development and embryonic stem cells which take us back to the abstractions in the mind of the developmental biologists.From:CambridgeUniversityViews:0 6ratingsTime:05:18More inEducation
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