Thus, instead of inventing two separate developmental blueprints, the bees differentially use one common plan to produce two distinct organismal outputs [ 17].
The repositioning of both pectoral motoneurons and the pectoral girdle along the body axis likely depended, in part, on evolutionary developmental changes in the blueprint of Hox gene expression, which is important for both neuroectoderm and mesoderm patterning along the anterior posterior axis45.
Though everyone's brain begins with "a basic scaffold of connectivity that is formed according to genetic blueprints," said Dr. Carla Shatz, a developmental neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School, "a baby's brain is not a miniature of the adult's, but rather is a dynamically changing structure".
We lack almost any insight into late developmental events such as specification of axonal and dendritic blueprints, synaptic partner selection or expression of channels and receptors that define the physiological characteristics of mature interneurons.
We now have the blueprints of how plants grow and undergo complex developmental processes through the rapidly expanding collection of plant genome sequences.
Not only does our study provide a mechanistic basis that helps to explain the developmental associations of vitamin D with asthma, it may also provide a methodologic blueprint for rationally interrogating diverse developmental pathways for their genomic association with subsequent disease outcomes.
Therefore, developmental studies, including the characterization of zebrafish mutants, can provide a roadmap or blueprint to re-establish or augment cellular differentiation or tissue function to aid regenerative repair in vivo, or in vitro for the stepwise production and expansion of stem and progenitor populations for therapeutic cellular replacement strategies.
This evo-devo perspective blurs boundaries between genotype and phenotype, shrinking the role of genes as inert blueprints and instead expanding their role as vectors in dynamic organisms as developmental switches or triggers or context-dependent operational guides to phenotypic expression.
Specific cell types have their unique developmental program and respond differently to environmental challenges, yet are orchestrated by the same genetic blueprint.
