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- 201104 building brains
Building Brains: An introduction to neural development
This new book provides a highly visual and readily accessible introduction to the main events that occur during neural development and the mechanisms by which they occur.
Aimed at undergraduate students and postgraduates new to the field, who may not have a background in neuroscience and/or molecular genetics.
It explains how cells in the early embryo first become neural, how their proliferation is controlled, what regulates the types of neural cells they become, how neurons connect to each other, how these connections are later refined under the influence of neural activity including that arising from experience, and why some neurons normally die.
A few years ago we started a new course here aiming to stimulate undergraduates in the middle years of their studies to think about some of the challenges and excitement of trying to understand how nervous systems are built. We did not set out to cover all possible topics equally. Instead, we selected areas that we thought provided the best understood or the most intriguing examples of how developmental events are controlled by a combination of instructions from the genome, from intercellular communication and from the organism's environment. We wrote this book based on these experiences in a way that we hope will appeal to students here and to those taking similar courses at other institutions.
Professor David Price
Centre for Integrative Physiology
This article was published on May 25, 2011