Big science meets small embryos

Recent advances in genomics and molecular biology have led to an explosive increase in the scale and speed of isolating and characterizing new genes involved in developmental processes. This was evident at the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology meeting. We focus here on the descriptions of two new model organisms being used for developmental studies, new results using various kinds of gene inactivation techniques and the impact of microarray techniques on developmental biology.David Kingsley (Stanford University, USA) demonstrated in his talk that genome mapping projects will not necessarily bias research towards only a few developmental systems. His interest in the evolution of the vertebrate skeleton has led him to study the stickleback - a powerful system because it allows the study of evolutionary changes in morphology over a relatively short time period defined by geological events. A number of lakes in North America and Northern Europe were created after the end of the last ice age, approximately 10,000 years ago. Sticklebacks colonized many of these lakes, and the fish have subsequently evolved into a whole range of different morphological types in response to differing food sources, predators, and other ecological conditions present in the lakes. In the space of a year and a half, Kingsley's group have already sequenced 4 megabases of the stickleback genome and assembled several hundred microsatellite repeats and expressed sequence tags into a genome-wide linkage map. In contrast to classical models, in which evolutionary change is thought to involve small changes in many genes, the initial genetic mapping studies in sticklebacks suggest that many of the most dramatic morphological differences between the fish are controlled by a small number of major genes. This work shows that modern genomics techniques can be applied to new organisms relatively easily, and the speed in which Kingsley's lab have set this system up is impressive.In the past few years, attenti