Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) are used as a laboratory animal model for multiple areas of scientific inquiry including, but not limited to, developmental biology, endocrinology, aging, immunology, behavior studies, and a variety of human genetic disorders. The quail embryo is an amniote with early developmental patterns remarkably similar to those of humans; as such they present significant experimental advantages for the study of amniotes, e.g., rapid reproductive maturation, modest size of breeding adults, ease of breeding in laboratory animal facilities, resilience to research manipulations, availability of transgenic lines, a fully sequenced genome, and tools for molecular manipulations.