The Neural Crest Migrating into the Twenty-First Century

From the initial discovery of the neural crest over 150 years ago to the seminal studies of Le Douarin and colleagues in the latter part of the twentieth century, understanding of the neural crest has moved from the descriptive to the experimental. Now, in the twenty- first century, neural crest research has migrated into the genomic age. Here, we reflect upon the major advances in neural crest biology and the open questions that will continue to make research on this incredible vertebrate cell type an important subject in developmental biology for the century to come.