The Stowers Institute’s Pourquié Lab has demonstrated the importance of Beta-catenin, a key component of the Wnt-signaling pathway in the process of somite formation. The work has been published on ...

Somites, precursors for the segmental structures such as the vertebral column, ribs and skeletal muscles, form periodically by segmentation of the rostral parts of the presomitic mesoderm (PSM). This ...

The team analyzed the somite segmentation process that results in the formation of the vertebral column. This process is thought to be controlled by two components: a molecular oscillator (the ...

The architecture of the body is not encoded as a formal blueprint; rather, it's the tightly orchestrated activation and deactivation of genes that coordinate body development. Many of these processes ...

More than 20 years ago, the lab of developmental biologist Olivier Pourquié discovered a sort of cellular clock in chicken embryos where each "tick" stimulates the formation of a structure called a ...

In vertebrates the repeated metameric pattern of the axial skeleton is evident early, demonstrated by the serially repeated segments known as somites. Somites are blocks of mesodermal tissue that ...

How are the body’s segments formed? The body of a vertebrate organism consists of segmented axes, which is most distinct in the skeleton. The process of somitogenesis is key to the development of ...

Each vertebrate species has a characteristic number of segments along the body axis — humans have only 33 whereas snakes can have over 300 (see image). What developmental genetic principles lie behind ...

Figure 1: A fluorescence image of an induced presomitic mesoderm (iPSM) tissue model, where cells expressing the Hes7 gene—a key regulator of somite formation—are labeled green. Purple cells express a ...