BIO 525: DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
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John Dilgen, a student a few years ago, attached these two Xenopus tadpoles while they were embryos. |
Catalog Description: BIO 525: DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY (S) Examination of embryology, molecular aspects of development, differentiation, regeneration and pattern formation. Three lectures, one three-hour laboratory. Prerequisite: A course in cell biology or equivalent. (4 cr. hr.)
Additional
Information: This course is taught in the Spring semester by Dr. Sternfeld.
The lecture is usually given in Bowers Hall 319 and the laboratories are held in Bowers 237.
This is generally a small class of juniors, seniors and graduate students. There
are two hour exams, one final and one paper plus lab quizzes and a practical exam. The course can be taken as Writing Intensive. While many of the
laboratory periods do not run the full three hours, students must be able to
return to lab to make observations of their embryos several times
throughout the week.
Lecture: The course begins with what is generally called "classical embryology" that describes the early developmental events in a variety of organisms such as sea urchin, frog and chick. About a week is then devoted to selected events in late embryogenesis such as eye and heart formation. Turning from this largely descriptive information, we next discuss the regulation of gene activity as it control's development and differentiation. We then go on to "non-embryological" development. We focus on organisms such as hydra and Dictyostelium as well as some non-embyrological processes such as regeneration and aging. Also in this part of the course we discuss the modern molecular understanding of some of the embyrological processes discussed earlier and some additional "model organisms" such as Drosophila and how its segmentation pattern.is created.
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| It is not very difficult to remove a head from one hydra and transplant it on another. |
Laboratory: Students find the laboratory the most exciting part of the course as they can actually observe the dramatic changes occurring in the embryos of sea urchin, frog and chick. Also, while students have often learned about regeneration experiments before, here they can do their own experiments on planaria, hydra and Dictyostelium and watch regeneration take place. Some of the experiments are particularly challenging such as trying to perform transplantation and parabiosis experiments (pictured at the top) using frog embryos. The Lab is scheduled exclusively on Tuesday mornings - and the laboratory is left open - so students can watch the rapid developmental events the rest of the day and the remainder of the week.
