A snapshot of the most highly ranked articles in developmental biology, from Faculty of 1000

Programs Author: Karen Young Kreeger (Ranked by scores on a survey of scholarly quality of program faculty among peers. Scores on a scale of 0 to 5*") Rank Institution Score Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 1 University of California, San Francisco 4.84 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.83 Stanford University 4.83 3 University of California, Berkeley 4.81 4 Harvard University 4.80 5 Yale University 4.59 Cell and Developmental Biology 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.86 2 Ro

Animals with human cells could provide donor organs or help us understand neuropsychiatric disorders.

From detecting gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field to feeling heat and the movement of water around them, animals can do more than just see, smell, touch, taste, and hear.

When I was a high school student, I came across Erwin Schrödingers What Is Life?. I still remember my exultant reaction—a combination of adolescent pride in feeling able to understand ideas considered beyond a young person’s means, and a genuine intellectual thrill engendered by the problems that Schrödinger addressed. Upon rereading the book, it appears to me that its major value was to provoke interest in a central problem of biology. Schrödinger’s question

FEATUREThe Ecology of Tumors Stem cells for brain cancer BY PETER B. DIRKSNeural stem cell biology took off in 1992 when Brent Reynolds and Samuel Weiss, working at the University of Calgary, discovered that culturing mammalian brain cells in serum-free conditions (in EGF and bFGF), yielded clonally derived colonies of undifferentiated neural cells (neurospheres). This culture system demonstrated that cells within these colonies showed cardinal pr

By Jeffrey M. Perkel Surpassing the Law of Averages How to expose the behaviors of genes, RNA, proteins, and metabolites in single cells. By necessity or convenience, almost everything we know about biochemistry and molecular biology derives from bulk behavior: From gene regulation to Michaelis-Menten kinetics, we understand biology in terms of what the “average” cell in a population does. But, as Jonathan Weissman of the University of Califo

The study of mini “brains” in a dish, derived from patient cells, offers a novel approach for autism spectrum disorder research.

Glial cells were once considered neurons’ supporting actors, but new methods and model organisms are revealing their true importance in brain function.