14-05-2012, 04:07 PM
Applications of developmental biology to medicine and animal agriculture
uses of d.b.ppt (Size: 41.53 KB / Downloads: 38)
The use of model organisms in functional genomics has begun to be recognized and exploited and is one example of the emerging use of the tools of developmental biology in recent drug discovery efforts.
. The use of protein products expressed during embryo-genesis and the use of certain pluripotent cell populations (stem cells) as candidate therapeutics are other applications of developmental biology to the treatment of human diseases.
These agents may be used to repair damaged or diseased tissues by inducing or directing developmental programs that recapitulate embryonic processes to replace specialized cells.
The activation or silencing of embryonic genes in the disease state, particularly those encoding transcription factors, is another avenue of exploitation.
Finally, the direct drug-induced manipulation of embryonic development is a unique application of developmental biology in animal agriculture.
The Gene Ontology or GO is by far the best known and most used of the standard bio-ontologies (it is used for protein annotation in Uniprot). Unlike Uniprot, it does not include sequence information but focuses on the properties of proteins and includes hierarchical knowledge about
(1) cellular locations,
(2) molecular functions, and
(3) the functional processes in which they are involved. For systems developmental biology