Fig. 1.

Rat prostate developmental stages, timeline and morphoregulatory gene expression. The days of fetal and postnatal life are shown at the bottom. Ventral prostate morphology and developmental stages (top) are sequentially aligned to the corresponding days that they appear. Note that cellular differentiation occurs during the later days of branching morphogenesis as indicated by blue-striped lines. Temporal patterns of morphoregulatory genes expression are shown in black-gray-white bars representing relative levels of gene expression as determined by quantitative real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction.