For decades, scientists have been able to look at individual moments in the development of an embryo: a snapshot of a developing brain, a picture of how the heart takes shape, or a glimpse of cells beginning to form the nervous system. A new study out of the lab of MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, offers one of the most detailed views yet of how a mammal is built, cell by cell. By following the family history of over a million cells as a mouse embryo develops, the researchers have created a kind of developmental blueprint, or movie, showing how cells divide and ultimately become the tissues and organs in the body. This open-access work, published Oct. 8 in the journal Cell, in collaboration with Zachary Smith's group at Yale University and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, provides a comprehensive view of a process that has long been studied in pieces: how a...
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