Hoxful Monsters

Pioneering work by Spemann and Mangold in early 1920’s on Salamanders ,where they transplanted a specific piece of embryonic tissue into another embryo resulting in a two headed Salamander.

Drosophila melanogaster, a model organism of choice for many researchers share any similarities with human beings at molecular and cellular level.If one look at the morphology of Drosophila ,its difficult for a common man to believe that we humans share so many common aspects with this little arthropod.This is one of the reason which makes Drosophila a powerful model system to study early development of embryo,organ formation ,disease and many more things, as many genes related to development and disease are shared by Flies and Humans. Another fact that makes …

Cells form the building blocks of all animals and diversity in animal forms can be attributed to the way these building blocks arrange themselves while proliferating.These things depend on cross talk between cells and which is termed as Signalling.This language of cross talk involves a series of players,where one component relay the received signal to the one downstream to it ,forming a chain reaction or signalling pathway.
Signalling pathways transduce signal from external medium into the nucleus,which results in turning ON or OFF of concerned target genes of that pathway.Cells …

Another academic year is coming to a close here in France and today @ IBDML we had penultimate external seminar ( every week we have a speaker from outside the institute and Next week we have final talk for this year by Bert Hobmayer ,from Univ of Innsburck ,Austria working with Cnidarians,so a fitting end to the year’s seminars) by Gerold schubiger ,Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle.In fact i was waiting for this seminar desperately since two weeks and finally it was worth waiting.I am fortunate enough to …