How does a tiny cluster of cells become an embryo with a head, trunk, and tail? And how do thousands of genes coordinate this development?

The last 40 years have witnessed a deep transformation in our views of animal development. From seeing development a multicellular black box where over time a mass of cells acquires shape to form ...

The embryos of many species can stop developing when starved of nutrients, only to restart the process once these are restored – and scientists may have figured out how they do it. In the early stages ...

The annual killifish lives in regions with extreme drought. A research group now reports that the early embryogenesis of killifish diverges from that of other species. Unlike other fish, their body ...

Scientists very rarely get access to most sharks, the development of their young or the nursery grounds where they grow. So seeing a hammerhead shark (Sphyrna tiburo) embryo, halfway through its ...

Nearly half the embryos studied underwent developmental arrest because of genetic mishaps in early development—a revealing insight that suggests more IVF babies could come to term with changes in the ...

At least 8% of the human genome is genetic material from viruses. It was considered ‘junk DNA’ until recently, but its role in human development is now known to be essential Researchers at the Spanish ...

Some newly reported clumps of cells growing in lab dishes have been hailed as the closest things to human embryos that scientists have ever made in the lab. These entities are human embryo models — ...