Insects determine their body segments in two different ways. Short-germband insects, such as the flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, use a molecular clock to establish segments sequentially. In contrast, long-germband insects, ...

Background: Waddington’s epigenetic landscape is an intuitive metaphor for the developmental and evolutionary potential of biological regulatory processes. It emphasises time-dependence and transient behaviour. Nowadays, ...

Gap genes are involved in segment determination during early development in dipteran insects (flies, midges, and mosquitoes). We carried out a systematic quantitative comparative analysis of the gap gene network across ...

The segmentation gene network in insects can produce equivalent phenotypic outputs despite differences in upstream regulatory inputs between species. We investigate the mechanistic basis of this phenomenon through a ...