• Focuses on common principles, rather than attempting to offer encyclopaedic coverage of the field: ideal coverage and depth for an undergraduate course, rather than overwhelming detail.
• Carefully selected further reading articles stimulate the student to explore the subject at a more advanced level, encouraging them to engage with the primary literature - the best resource to explore the details of very latest research.
• Beautifully clear full colour illustrations help the student to visualise the often conceptually-challenging principles being introduced, making the principles easier to grasp, and enhancing proper understanding.
• Numerous summary sections, both in words and diagrams, allow students to recognize and fully digest the important concepts, and are useful for revision.
• Online resource centre offers resources for both lecturer and student, making the book as effective as possible as both a teaching and learning tool.

New to this edition

• Increased emphasis on the molecular mechanisms of development reflects the direction of modern research, presenting to the student a true picture of developmental biology today.
• An improved organisation sees the chapter on the development of the invertebrate body plan placed before the vertebrate body plan, building the student's confidence through the understanding of a simple system, before progressing to a more complicated one.
• Model organisms are now introduced in the context of the systems and processes that they are used to probe, helping the student to see how these organisms are an integral part of the process of conducting research, and how they are used as tools to answer different biological questions.
• An expanded glossary, which includes definitions of new terminology, helps students to become rapidly familiar with the often daunting range of terms used to describe this subject.
• Greater coverage of organogenesis, oogenesis, spermatogenesis and evolutionary development reflect the continued expansion in our knowledge of these topics, giving the lecturer the flexibility to explore different topics to different depths, depending on the demands of their curriculum.

Readership: Undergraduates at all levels studying developmental biology as part of a broader life sciences degree.

Lewis Wolpert, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University College London, Jim Smith, Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, Tom Jessell, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, University of Columbia, New York, Peter Lawrence, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, Elizabeth Robertson, The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford, and Elliot Meyerowitz, California Institute of Technology

Review(s) from previous edition

"Wolpert is great as the first text students get on this subject...It is concise and clear, and excellent for getting those principles over without too much detail. - Reading University

"I like the fact that Wolpert illustrates well all the principles of developmental biology and gives my students the background to read and understand research articles and at the same time does not cover all the fine details where the students can get lost and fail to learn the basic principles of developmental biology. This is one of my principal reasons for choosing the Wolpert textbook as the primary textbook in my course. " - California State University

1: History and basic concepts
2: Development of the Drosophila body plan
3: Patterning the vertebrate body plan I: axes and germ layers
4: Patterning the vertebrate body plan II: the somites and early nervous system
5: Development of nematodes, sea urchins, ascidians, and slime molds
6: Plant development
7: Morphogenesis: change in form in the early embryo
8: Cell differentiation and stem cells
9: Organogenesis
10: Development of the nervous system
11: Germ cells, fertilization and sex
12: Growth and post-embryonic development
13: Regeneration
14: Evolution and development
Glossary