Developmental Biology
Mike Bate 
Emeritus Professor of Developmental Neurobiology
Email: cmb16@cam.ac.uk
Tel.: +44 (0)1223 336639/31
My research is concerned with the way in which the machinery underlying coordinated movement is assembled during embryonic development. On the one hand this involves an analysis of the way in which muscles are assembled, specified and patterned and on the other an investigation of the way in which motor circuits are generated and begin to function. We work with the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster and this means that, as a group, we can bring a combination of genetic, molecular and cellular techniques to bear on these fundamental issues of neuromuscular development. At the moment we are working on the genetic basis of myoblast recruitment and fusion and on an electrophysiological and structural analysis of the way in which functional properties are acquired by embryonic neurons.
Selected publications
- Zlatic, M., Landgraf, M. & Bate, M. 2003. Genetic specification of axonal arbors: atonal regulates robo3 to position terminal branches in the Drosophila nervous system. Neuron. 37(1): 41-51.
- Suster, M. L. & Bate, M. 2002. Embryonic assembly of a central pattern generator without sensory input. Nature. 416(6877): 174-178.
- Ruiz-Gómez, M., Coutts, N., Suster, M.L., Landgraf, M & Bate, M . 2002. Myoblasts incompetent encodes a zinc finger transcription factor required to specify fusion competent myoblasts in Drosophila. Development. 129(1) : 133-141.
- Baines, R.A., Seugnet, L., Thompson, A., Salvaterra, P.M. & Bate M. 2002. Regulation of Synaptic Connectivity: Levels of Fasciclin II influence synaptic growth in the Drosophila CNS. The Journal of Neuroscience. 22(15): 6587-6595.
- Bate, M. 1998. Making sense of behaviour. Int. J. Dev. Biol. 42: 507-509
- Baines R. and Bate, M. 1998. Electrophysiological development of central neurones in the Drosophila embryo J. Neurosci. 18: 4673-4683.
- Baylies M., Bate, M., and Ruiz-Gomez M. 1998. Myogenesis: a view from Drosophila. Cell 93: 921-927
- Landgraf M., Roy S., Prokop A., Vijay Raghavan K. and Bate, M. 1999. Even-skipped determines the dorsal growth of motor axons in Drosophila. Neuron 22: 43-52.
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