A major lesson of developmental biology is that vertebrate and invertebrate development are more similar than once imagined, but to write about development in depth across all species has become a gargantuan task. Instead, people have tended to address the general principles of animal design or, at the other extreme, how an individual organ system such as the brain develops. It is hard to find a recent book with an exclusively vertebrate focus, and Patterning in Vertebrate Development now fills that gap, with an emphasis on processes at the molecular level. The latest in the ‘Frontiers in Molecular Biology’ series, this is not a single-handed attempt at the ‘Making of a Vertebrate’, attractive as that might be, nor is it the published proceedings of a conference. Each chapter comes from different contributors who have written broad reviews of their fields rather than narrower accounts of their own research.
The coverage runs from positional information through axis determination, segmentation, nervous system and limb, to a concluding chapter on vertebrate evolution, and is prone to some unevenness that is inevitable in a multi-author book such as this. For example, three chapters alone on the nervous system, and none on other major organ systems such as heart or kidney, may seem partisan, but the focus is really on patterning and the systems chosen arguably suffice to illustrate the general principles. There is a useful introductory chapter on establishing the body plan, comparing Xenopus with chick, mouse and zebrafish, which will orientate the newcomer to the complexities of early cell rearrangements in vertebrate embryos. The inclusion of evolution is also welcome, for example in thinking about the implications of gene duplication, or the origins of fins/limbs, or in showing how adjustments to Hox gene regulation have been crucial in the evolving skeleton. The quality of contributions is invariably high, with helpful diagrams and copious references, and the result is an excellent book for the final year student and beyond. As the Editor exhorts, read on and enjoy!