Issues

Summary: This Review highlights how apoptotic cells impact the surrounding tissue to promote morphogenesis and remodelling through secreted signals during development, regeneration and cancer.

Summary: This Review discusses recent progress in the understanding of the mechanisms of photoreceptor specification from neural progenitors and their implications for the treatment of retinal diseases.

Summary: This Review explores the differences and similarities between the biological processes driving developmental cell differentiation and those mediating cell reprogramming.

Summary: Unbiased functional genomics approaches reveal that Nkx2.2, Nkx6.1 and Olig2 directly repress multiple alternative fates during mammalian neural progenitor fate specification.

Highlighted article: The exposure of hESCs to IGF1 and to COCO, which inhibits BMP, TGFβ and Wnt signaling pathways, efficiently differentiates them into functional cone photoreceptors.

Highlighted article: In mouse embryos, FOXF1 marks all extra-embryonic mesoderm derivatives except for the blood lineage and actively restrains the specification of mesodermal progenitors to hematopoiesis.

Summary: In the adult Drosophila midgut, depletion of Ttk69 in intestinal progenitor cells induces their differentiation into enteroendocrine cells, at the expense of enterocyte generation.

Summary: In the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, SoxB and Atonal-like genes, which participate in Notch signalling, regulate neural progenitor specification via parallel yet interacting mechanisms.

Highlighted article: In the developing reproductive tissue of plants, HECATE 1 and SPATULA coordinate auxin and cytokinin signalling to orchestrate the development of the gynoecium.

Summary: In the developing Xenopus embryo, Asporin activates the IGFR-mediated signalling pathway and perturbs Wnt, BMP and Activin signalling pathways to induce eye formation.

Summary: The translational repressors Brat and Pumilio attenuate Dpp signalling range in the Drosophila female germline and early embryo to ensure precise cell fate patterning.

Summary: During tooth development in mice, Nfic binds to Hhip to control Shh signaling, a process crucial for apical papilla growth and proper root formation.

Summary: In mice, the canonical Wnt signaling pathway regulates Bmp4 signaling pathway activation in corneal keratocytes to modulate corneal epithelial stratification during development.

Summary: The translation timing of Cyclin B1 RNA during meiotic prophase in the male Drosophila germline is regulated by two interacting proteins, Rbp4 and Fest.

Summary: During tissue closure in Drosophila, Pvr is required for efficient corpse clearance by hemocytes and for protrusive activity in the epidermis.

Summary: In vertebrates, V1 interneuron specification requires Prdm12, whose expression depends on Pax6 and retinoic acid and is restricted to the p1 domain by Dbx1 and Nkx6.1/2, themselves repressed by Prdm12.

Summary: Live imaging in Xenopus reveals that Pk2, a cytoplasmic effector of the PCP pathway, controls the directional ciliary beating in multiciliated cells by regulating Vangl1 dynamics at the cell cortex.

Summary: During myogenesis in Drosophila embryos, Tropomyosin, previously known to regulate muscle contraction, promotes myotube elongation, myoblast fusion and sarcomeric gene expression.