An important and burgeoning part of developmental biology that can be broadly defined as the study of how the genotype is transformed into the phenotype during development. Thus, it concerns identifying the mechanisms of differential gene expression from the same nuclear material during development. It arose from a division between embryologists and geneticists as to the role of genes in development during the first half of the 20th century. Today, its two main methods are forward and reverse genetics, the former for identifying genes responsible for particular genotypes and the latter for discovering phenotypes through changing the functions of specific genes. It has been claimed that developmental genetics was revolutionized by a single paper entitled ‘Mutations affecting segment number and polarity in drosophila’ that was published in Nature (1980) by the developmental geneticists Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus working together at the European Molecular Laboratory in Heidelberg. This paper reported the importance of maternal effect genes in the formation of the body axis of the Drosophila embryo. It galvanised a series of studies on development, first in Drosophila and then in other organisms, including vertebrates. Moreover, the paper was instrumental in building a bridge between developmental biology and cell biology. The significance of their work was recognised by the fact that they shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with another developmental geneticist Edward B. Lewis (1918-2004) who also carried out research on the mechanisms of genetic control in the embryonic development of Drosophila. The term ‘genetics’ was introduced by William Bateson (1861-1926) in 1906.
See Behavioral genetics, Behavior genetics, Boss (or bride of sevenless), Caenorhabditis (C.) elegans (or nematode), Developmental psychobiology, Forward genetics, Molecular biology, Reverse genetics, R7 and R8 photoreceptors