Acknowledgement

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The completion of this study would have been not possible if not dependent on the steadfast support and encouragement of my wife and daughter. They hence paid equal contribution to the study for which I always feel profound gratitude in my heart. I would like to express here the very thanks to my dissertation advisor, Prof. Dr. Horst Grunz, University of Essen, who provided me the opportunity to do such a research in his laboratory, ushered me in to the discipline of developmental biology, and instructed me the delicate embryological methodologies. I also owe my special thanks to Dr. Yonglong Chen, now a postdoc in Goettingen, for sharing his experimental experiences at the beginning of the research; to my colleague Hui Zhao for his kind cooperation during the research; to Sabine Effenberger for her dexterous preparation of histological sections and many other helps; to Annette Klippstein for her effort in typing the manuscript of the dissertation and also many other helps during the research; and to Drs. Yonglong Chen (Goettingen, Germany), Eddy M. DeRobertis (Los Angeles, USA), H. Beverley Osborne (Rennes, France), Tewis Bouwmeester (Heidelberg, Germany), Christof Niehrs (Heidelberg, Germany), Ralph Rupp (Munich, Germany), Chris Kintner (San Diego, USA), David J. Anderson (Pasadena, USA), Eric Bellefroid (Brussels, Belgium), Jacquiline Lee (New York, USA), J. Peter Gergen (Stony Brook, USA), Nancy Papalopulu (Cambridge, UK), Gerhard Schlosser (Bremen, Germany), and Kathy Zimmermann (New York, USA), for their generous gifts of plasmids.