Genomic Control Process: Development and Evolution

Genomic Control Process explores the biological phenomena around genomic regulatory systems that control and shape animal development processes, and which determine the nature of evolutionary processes that affect body plan. Unifying and simplifying the descriptions of development and evolution by focusing on the causality in these processes, it provides a comprehensive method of considering genomic control across diverse biological processes.

This book is essential for graduate researchers in genomics, systems biology and molecular biology seeking to understand deep biological processes which regulate the structure of animals during development.

• Covers a vast area of current biological research to produce a genome oriented regulatory bioscience of animal life
• Places gene regulation, embryonic and postembryonic development, and evolution of the body plan in a unified conceptual framework
• Provides the conceptual keys to interpret a broad developmental and evolutionary landscape with precise experimental illustrations drawn from contemporary literature
• Includes a range of material, from developmental phenomenology to quantitative and logic models, from phylogenetics to the molecular biology of gene regulation, from animal models of all kinds to evidence of every relevant type
• Demonstrates the causal power of system-level understanding of genomic control process

• Conceptually organizes a constellation of complex and diverse biological phenomena
• Investigates fundamental developmental control system logic in diverse circumstances and expresses these in conceptual models
• Explores mechanistic evolutionary processes, illuminating the evolutionary consequences of developmental control systems as they are encoded in the genome

Isabelle S. Peter is Assistant Research Professor and Eric H. Davidson is Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. Over the last seven years they have co-authored a series of works on experimental, conceptual and computational analyses of developmental gene regulatory networks, including their evolutionary significance. The discussions and conceptual explorations occasioned by this collaboration produced the new synthetic views encompassed in this book, building on decades of earlier work summarized in the 2001 and 2006 Academic Press books by Eric H. Davidson.