Avian model systems

Professor Rusty Lansford discuss the attributes that make birds a good model system - we can see developmental events that are going on in an egg that cannot be seen in a mammal in utero.

A bird is a good model organism because we can watch the embryo develop. That means that we can see events that are going on inside quail or a chicken that you wouldn’t be able to see going on in a mammal because it is in utero. What we often do is, we will look at the embryo dynamically, using some microscopy tricks, or we can do tissue transplants. We can control in time and in space what we’re trying to watch. If we want to watch a heart develop, we can watch a heart develop and we can do tissue transplants likewise in the nervous system.