The Mouse Embryo at Center Stage

Mouse Development: Patterning, Morphogenesis and Organogenesis Edited by J. Rossant and P.P.L. Tam San Diego, CA: Academic Press (2002). 500 pp. $179.95The mouse embryo, as it develops hidden away inside the mother's uterus, seems even more mysterious than the other embryos that are commonly studied by developmental biologists. The large externally developing embryos of chickens, frogs, and fish offer the opportunity to move cells about experimentally and to visualize cell behavior over the complete course of embryonic development. With appropriate GFP-tagged proteins, even cells in smaller embryos like those of Drosophila and C. elegans can be followed in real time throughout all of embryonic development. In contrast, the mouse embryo has seemed less tractable for embryological analysis, despite our self-interest in mammalian development.The difficulties of the mouse embryo have been compounded by the lack of good published descriptions of the events of mouse development. Those interested in mouse embryology had a very limited choice of reference books. These included the excellent, but extremely short, chapter in Manipulating the Mouse Embryo (Hogan et al., eds., Cold Spring Harbor Press, 1994), and the Atlas of Mouse Development by M.H. Kaufman (Academic Press, 1992), which has comprehensive photographs but minimal accompanying text.At last, Janet Rossant and Patrick Tam have compiled a book that reveals the extraordinary depth of knowledge that is available on mouse embryogenesis. Rossant and Tam identified the leaders in 23 different aspects of mouse embryology and convinced them to contribute to this book; the list of authors is a who's who in mouse biology. Chapters are grouped into three sections, Establishment of Body Patterns, Lineage Specification and Differentiation, and Organogenesis. Each section covers the appropriate topics to give a comprehensive overview of mouse embryology. Most of the contributions provide a scholarly balance of historical perspective, description of embryological events and embryological experiments, and, to the extent it is known, the molecular mechanisms of the process.Every chapter will be of interest to both specialists and developmental biologists who study other organisms. Two of my favorites were the chapters on development of the hematopoietic system (Speck, Peeters, and Dzierzak) and the heart (Harvey). I found these two chapters to be great reading, and they told me just the kinds of things I wanted to know about these aspects of embryonic development.Some aspects of embryonic development apparently didn't fit within the topics of patterning, morphogenesis, and organogenesis and are missing from this book. It would have been useful to have chapters on mammalian-specific topics such as X-inactivation, imprinting, and mouse models for human birth defects. Some authors carefully define anatomical and system-specific terms, but others launch into jargon that will not be readily understood by those outside the field. Students, developmental biologists working on other organisms, and mouse biologists struggling to understand the phenotype of their knockout mouse would have been grateful for a glossary to define terms like spongiotrophoblast and coloboma.The high quality of the contributions to Mouse Development is comparable to the classics on Drosophila and C. elegans development that are on the shelf of every developmental biologist, The Biology of Drosophila (Demerec), The Development of Drosophila melanogaster, (Bate and Martinez-Arias, eds.), and C. elegans II, (Riddle et al., eds). The mouse embryo offers the same rich historical and multidimensional understanding of the events of embryonic development as flies and worms, so that it can support a book of this magnitude. Mechanistic understanding of Drosophila development is still ahead, but with this strong foundation, mouse development will not lag behind for long.Now the bad news. The illustrations in the book are limited in number and many are of extremely poor quality. Some of the figures appear to be scanned in from PDF files and the words in some are actually illegible. For a topic as extraordinarily three-dimensional and dependent on images as contemporary embryology, this is a shocking failure and an extraordinary disappointment. I can only speculate that the publisher set limitations on the number and resolution of figures that accompany the chapters. Perhaps the lack of adequate figures does help emphasize the high quality of the text, and I was forced to reflect on how the PowerPoint world has made us more dependent on images than on carefully worded text.Despite this enormous flaw, this is a book that should be on the shelf of every student of developmental biology. Given the rapid pace of progress in this field, we can hope that a new edition with illustrations of a quality as high as that of the text will come out very soon.