Covering more than 50 central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, this book offers an overview of this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.

TO ACCESS THE DEDICATED TEXTBOOK WEBSITE, PLEASE VISIT www.blackwellpublishing.com/slack Essential Developmental Biology, 2nd Edition, is a concise and well-illustrated treatment of this subject for undergraduates. With an emphasis throughout on the evidence underpinning the main conclusions, this book is suitable as the key text for both introductory and more advanced courses in developmental biology. Includes new chapters on Evolution & Development, Gut Development, & Growth and Aging. Contains expanded treatment of mammalian fertilization, the heart and stem cells. Now features a glossary, notated further reading, and key discovery boxes. Illustrated with over 250 detailed, full-color drawings. Accompanied by a dedicated website, featuring animated developmental processes, a photo gallery of selected model organisms, and all art in PowerPoint and jpeg formats (also available to instructors on CD-ROM). An Instructor manual CD-ROM for this title is available. Please contact our Higher Education team at [email protected] for more information.

Branching morphogenesis, the creation of branched structures in the body, is a key feature of animal and plant development. This book brings together, for the first time, expert researchers working on a variety of branching systems to present a state-of-the-art view of the mechanisms that control branching morphogenesis. Systems considered range from single cells, to blood vessel and drainage duct systems to entire body plans, and approaches range from observation through experiment to detailed biophysical modelling. The result is an integrated overview of branching.

The greatest mystery of life is how a single fertilized egg develops into a fully functioning, sometimes conscious multicellular organism. Embryogenesis Explained offers a new theory of how embryos build themselves, and combines simple physics with the most recent biochemical and genetic breakthroughs, based on the authors' prediction and then discovery of differentiation waves. They explain their ideas in a form accessible to the lay person and a broad spectrum of scientists and engineers. The diverse subjects of development, genetics and evolution, and their physics, are brought together to explain this major, previously unanswered scientific question of our time.As a follow up on The Hierarchical Genome, this book is a shorter but conceptually expanded work for the reader who is interested in science. It is useful as a starting point for the curious layman or the scientist or professional encountering the problem of embryogenesis without the formal biology background. There is also material useful for the seasoned biologist caught up in the new rush of information about the role of mechanics in developmental biology and cellular level mechanics in medicine.