The course provides a basic understanding of important developmental processes. It explains core developmental mechanisms, including pattern formation, cell determination, differentiation and specification of tissue types. The course will illustrate the mode of action of developmental control genes, in particular those encoding transcription factors, cell-cell communication molecules and signal transduction components. The course will cover different aspects and mechanisms in developmental biology and compares them between different model organisms. In addition to lectures, computer cases and literature presentations complementary to each topic will be implemented to provide "hands-on" insight into the topics of interest, recent sophisticated techniques for developmental analysis will be introduced and observations on real samples will be performed.