The OCIAD protein family: comparative developmental biology and stem cell application.

Over the last two decades, an exponential growth in technologies and techniques available to biologists has provided mind-boggling quantities of data and led to information overload. Yet, answers to fundamental questions such as "how are we made?" and "what keeps us ticking?" remain incomplete. Developmental biology has provided elegant approaches to address such questions leading to enlightening insights. While several important contributions to developmental biology have come from India over the decades, this area of research remains nascent. Here, we review the journey in India, from the discovery of the ociad gene family to decoding its role in development and stem cells. We compare analysis in silico, in vivo and ex vivo, with developmental models such as Drosophila, mouse and stem cells that gave important insight into how these clinically significant genes function.