Implications of Developmental Gene Regulatory Networks Inside and Outside Developmental Biology

The insight that the genomic control of developmental process is encoded in the form of gene regulatory networks has profound impacts on many areas of modern bioscience. Most importantly, it affects developmental biology itself, as it means that a causal understanding of development requires knowledge of the architecture of regulatory network interactions. Furthermore, it follows that functional changes in developmental gene regulatory networks have to be considered as a primary mechanism for evolutionary process. We here discuss some of the recent advances in gene regulatory network biology and how they have affected our current understanding of development, evolution, and regulatory genomics.