People have always wondered how traits or characters are transmitted from parents to their offspring.

Following fertilization, the single celled embryo undergoes a number of mitotic divisions to produce a ball of cells called a blastula or blastoderm. Although these cells are all genetically identical, they gradually begin to express different gene products that reflect the regions of the adult body they will form. In my first lecture I discuss how these initial patterns of gene expression arise. In Drosophila, a maternally supplied transcription factor called Bicoid plays a particularly important role. Bcd RNA is anchored at the anterior end of the egg but is …

An embryo is defined as any organism in a stage before birth or hatching, or in plants, before germination occurs. After cleavage, the dividing cells, or morula, becomes a hollow ball, or blastula, which develops a hole or pore at one end.
All triploblastic animals (Three germ layers / all Bilaterians animals ) can be further divided into Protostomes and Deutereostomes based on the fate of first opening of the development. If in the blastula the first pore (blastopore) becomes the mouth of the animal, it is a protostome and if …

The classification of animals and plants is done based on the physical characteristics. The order of classification follows this pattern: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.
As one can see the largest groups are the kingdoms. All living things on our planet can be divided in 5 kingdoms. Most animals belong to the kingdom Animalia, and most plants belong to the kingdom Plantae. The other 3 kingdoms are Protista which contains one-celled animals like protozoan, whereas Monera include simple plants and animals like bacteria and blue-green algae, and …

Stem cells are cell with remarkable ability to develop into many different cell types in the body and also can self renew to produce more stem cells. In other words when a stem cell divide it can either form a specialized cell ( differentiation ) , such as a blood cell, a Heart cell a brain cell or can remain as a stem cell.
Two important features like indefinite ability to divide to form a specialized cell and self renewal, differentiates a stem cell from any other …

Developmental biology is the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop. Modern developmental biology studies the genetic control of cell growth, differentiation and “morphogenesis”, which is the process that gives rise to tissues, organs and anatomy.
One of the important goal for developmental biologists is to understand how humans develop from a single celled embryo to highly complex multi celled adult and also to find cures to different diseases we encounter during our life span.This is all possible when one can understand the mechanisms underlying various aspects of …

Drosophila melanogaster is a famous model system used to understand various aspects of life.This is largely due to various aspects of fruit fly like its fast development cycle, easy and cheap to culture in lab,wide array of genetic tool (various mutants available, markers,balancer chromosomes, salivary gland chromosomes or gaint chromosomes, UAS – GAL4 system,P element transformation for generating transgenic fly, UAS RNAI for gene Knock down) and fully sequenced genome of about 12 Drosophila species.