`There is an intangible something about the process of gastrulation that invariably generates enormous awe and curiosity', writes Claudio Stern in the Preface to an excellent and timely book that he has edited, titled Gastrulation: From Cells to Embryo, and that has been recently published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Indeed, it is the process of gastrulation that transforms an unimpressive, amorphous heap of cells that makes up each animal at the blastula stage of development, into a gastrula in which three germ layers, the endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm, are shaped into a body plan that is characteristic of each systematic group. It is also during gastrulation that largely pluripotent embryonic cells become initially biased,then specified and finally committed to form specialized cell types such as muscles, blood and neurons. Thus, a two-dimensional map of tissues and organs in the blastula is translated through dramatic gastrulation movements into...

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