A quartet of studies by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) highlight a special feature on gene regulatory networks recently published in the Proceedings of the National ...

Craniofacial birth defects, including cleft lip and palate, are among the most common human congenital malformations. These craniofacial anomalies occur because of defects in neural crest cells, whose ...

An international team of researchers has identified a key genetic mechanism that regulates the formation and migration of cranial neural crest cells, which are essential for developing facial ...

Neural crest cells -- embryonic pluripotent cells within the facial primordium -- may be necessary for forming proper animal facial structures. Researchers have produced neural crest cell-rich ...

Researchers have revealed the mechanisms behind mutations that cause a congenital condition called aplasia cutis congenita, in which babies are born without skin along the midline of the scalp The ...

The origin of the vertebrate jaw is something of a mystery. In the March 28 Nature, Martin Cohn from the University of Reading suggests that Hox gene expression may be at the origin of jaw evolution ...

A mature cell of one type can be turned into a mature cell of another type without the cell having to pass through an earlier stage of development. This is called direct reprogramming, a reliable but ...