A spine is a spine is a spine—or is it? From sharks to salamanders to hawks to humans, vertebrates have backbones in common. Even so, vertebrae can form in divergent ways and have a variety of ...

A chance mutation that led to spinal defects in a zebrafish has opened a little window into our own fishy past. Rising fifth-year Duke graduate student Brianna Peskin, who started the project during ...

In the bony fish, known as teleosts, building the spine relies on a tube-like structure running the length of the developing embryo called the notochord. The notochord sets up the patterns that lead ...