make a short report on advancement of biology
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Explanation:
Hey... It will be a long answer to this question. Hence, biology has advanced very much with the growing technology.
Answer:
6
Recent Advances in Developmental Biology
The absence of an incisive understanding of the action of toxicants on development has been in large part attributable to the absence of understanding of development itself. Until a few years ago, there was no understanding of a “developmental mechanism” at the molecular level although there were explanations at the cellular and tissue levels, such as “gastrulation is the mechanism by which the organization of the egg is transformed into the organization of the embryo.” Recent advances in developmental biology have been substantial enough for scientists to be confident for the first time that some aspects of development in some organisms are understood at the molecular level. Protein components are identified, their functions in developmental processes are known, and the time and place in the embryo of expression of the genes encoding them are known. This knowledge greatly benefits elucidating the mechanisms of developmental toxicity.
In this chapter, the committee, in response to its charge, evaluates the state of the science for elucidating mechanisms of developmental toxicity and presents insights of developmental biology. It will show the promise of the subject in the next decade for understanding the action of developmental toxicants.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
Observations of embryos and embryonic stages were made and recorded in antiquity (e.g., Aristotle, fourth century BC) and with increasing attention in recent centuries (e.g., Malphigi in the 1600s, Wolff in the 1700s, and von Baer in the early 1800s). However, it was only in the late nineteenth century that scientists pursued a detailed description of the embryonic stages of a variety of verte-
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Suggested Citation:"6 Recent Advances in Developmental Biology." National Research Council. 2000. Scientific Frontiers in Developmental Toxicology and Risk Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9871.
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brates and invertebrates, aided by the then-recent improvements in light microscopy and in staining methods and stimulated by Darwin’s proposals that the study of ontogeny (i.e., the animal’s embryonic development) holds clues to phylogeny (i.e., its evolutionary origin). Among the highlights during the period of 1880-1940 were the detailed anatomical descriptions of developmental stages of embryos, including the first atlas of human embryos, reconstructed from microscopic sections, published by W. His, Sr., in 1880-1885. In vertebrate embryology, these descriptions revealed the organogenesis of the heart, kidney, limbs, central nervous system (CNS), and eyes. Developmental-fate mapping studies revealed the embryonic sites of the origin of cells of the organs and the rearrangements of groups of cells in morphogenesis. The stages of development were found to include, in reverse order, cytodifferentiation, organogenesis, morphogenesis (gastrulation and neurulation), rapid cleavage, fertilization, and gametogenesis. By the 1940s, anatomical descriptions of the embryos of related animals were integrated into coherent evolutionary schemes, taught in comparative embryology classes, revealing, for example, the modification of the gill slits of jawless fish to the jaw of jawed fish and further modification to the middle ear of mammals. Also, by this time, Haeckel’s oversimplified scheme had been abandoned, namely, that ontogeny merely recapitulates phylogeny.
Experimental embryology also began in the late 1800s. In experimental studies, which mostly involved techniques of cell and tissue transplantation and removal, the central role of cytoplasmic localizations and cell-lineage-restricted developmental fates was recognized in the development of certain invertebrates by the early 1900s. In vertebrate development, the importance of inductions (also called tissue interactions) was recognized in the 1920s, following the stunning organizer transplantation experiments by Spemann and Mangold (1924) on newt embryos. By the 1950s, inductions had been found in every stage and place in the vertebrate embryo, for example, in all the kinds of organogenesis. Vertebrate development, including that of mammals, had become comprehensible as a branching succession of inductive interactions among neighboring members of an increasingly large number of different cell groups of the embryo.
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