Thoroughly updated, streamlined, and enhanced with pedagogical features, the twelfth edition of Barresi and Gilbert's Developmental Biology engages students and empowers instructors to effectively teach both the stable principles and the newest front-page research of this vast, complex, and multi-disciplinary field. This much loved, well-illustrated, and remarkably well written textbook invigorates the classical insights of embryology with cutting edge material, and makes the most complex topics understandable to a new generation of students. Designed with the undergraduate student in mind, this new, streamlined edition now contains studies of plant development, expanded coverage of regeneration, over a hundred new and revised illustrations, and deeply integrated active learning resources that build on the text's enthusiasm and accuracy. This is a text designed to make students become excited about how animals and plants develop their complex bodies from simple origins.

The new edition makes it easier to customize one's developmental biology course to the needs and interests of today's students, integrating the printed book with electronic interviews, videos, and tutorials. Michael J. F. Barresi brings his creativity and expertise as a teacher and as an artist of computer-mediated learning to the book, allowing the professor to use both standard and alternative ways of teaching animal and plant development.

Michael J. F. Barresi is Professor of Biological Sciences at Smith College, where he has pioneered the use of a variety of technologies to engage student in novel ways with the concepts of developmental biology as well as the researchers making the discoveries of this field.

Scott F. Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology Emeritus at Swarthmore College and a Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Helsinki. He has received the Viktor Hamburger Prize in teaching from the Society of Developmental Biology as well as the Alexander Kowalevsky Award in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.

PART I. PATTERNS AND PROCESSES OF BECOMING: A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING ANIMAL DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1. Making New Bodies: Mechanisms of Developmental Organization
Chapter 2. Specifying Identity: Mechanisms of Developmental Patterning
Chapter 3. Differential Gene Expression: Mechanisms of Cell Differentiation
Chapter 4. Cell-to-Cell Communication: Mechanisms of Morphogenesis
Chapter 5. Stem Cells: Their Potential and Their Niches

PART II. GAMETOGENESIS AND FERTILIZATION: THE CIRCLE OF SEX

Chapter 6. Sex Determination and Gametogenesis
Chapter 7. Fertilization: Beginning a New Organism

PART III. EARLY DEVELOPMENT: CLEAVAGE, GASTRULATION, AND AXIS FORMATION

Chapter 8. Rapid Specification in Snails and Nematodes
Chapter 9. The Genetics of Axis Specification in Drosophila
Chapter 10. Sea Urchins and Tunicates: Deuterostome Invertebrates
Chapter 11. Amphibians and Fish
Chapter 12. Birds and Mammals

PART IV. BUILDING WITH ECTODERM: THE VERTEBRATE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND EPIDERMIS

Chapter 13. Neural Tube Formation and Patterning
Chapter 14. Brain Growth
Chapter 15. Neural Crest Cells and Axonal Specificity
Chapter 16. Ectodermal Placodes and the Epidermis

PART V. BUILDING WITH MESODERM AND ENDODERM: ORGANOGENESIS

Chapter 17. Paraxial Mesoderm: The Somites and Their Derivatives
Chapter 18. Intermediate and Lateral Plate Mesoderm: Heart, Blood, and Kidneys
Chapter 19. Development of the Tetrapod Limb
Chapter 20. The Endoderm: Tubes and Organs for Digestion and Respiration

PART VI. POSTEMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 21. Metamorphosis: The Hormonal Reactivation of Development
Chapter 22. Regeneration

PART VII. DEVELOPMENT IN WIDER CONTEXTS

Chapter 23. Development in Health and Disease: Birth, Defects, Endocrine Disruptors, and Cancer
Chapter 24. Development and the Environment: Biotic, Abiotic, and Symbiotic Regulation of Development
Chapter 25. Development and Evolution: Developmental Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change

Glossary
Author Index
Subject Index