Issues

Summary: This Meeting Review of the 2017 RIKEN-CDB Symposium summarises recent progress in our understanding of human development, genetics and our evolutionary history.

Summary: This Review discusses the mechanisms that underpin the formation of skeletal muscle during development and its recapitulation from pluripotent stem cells in vitro.

Summary: This Review discusses the principal mechanisms involved in thyroid organogenesis, highlighting the factors involved in thyroid progenitor specification and the events occurring during thyroid gland morphogenesis.

Highlighted Article: Constitutive activation of the MAPK/ERK pathway causes pituitary hyperplasia, abnormal morphogenesis, and abnormal endocrine cell specification due to the sustained proliferation of the Sox2⁺ stem cell compartment.

Highlighted Article: Quantitative differences in medial myosin pulse intensity and frequency are critical to distinguish delaminating neuroblasts from their neighbors.

Highlighted Article: KAT8 represses ROS levels in oocytes by promoting the expression of antioxidant genes, while genetic deletion of KAT8 leads to female infertility.

Highlighted Article: Secreted MSPds promote the localization of mitochondria within the body wall muscle during development, with implications for ALS. See also the companion paper by Cottee et al.

Highlighted Article: vpr-1 null mutants are sterile upon hatching, a defect rescued by the expression of MSPd from almost any tissue except for the somatic gonad itself. See also the companion paper by Schultz et al.

Highlighted Article: Btbd7 promotes in vivo branching morphogenesis by decreasing cell-cell adhesion and increasing cell motility in a site-specific manner at the tips of epithelial end buds.

Summary: Experimental data together with computational modeling indicate a novel mechanism by which FGF10 influences fungiform papillae size via non-transcriptional effects on canonical Wnt diffusion.

Summary: Dmrt1 is both necessary and sufficient to initiate testicular differentiation in T. scripta, thereby acting as a key upstream regulator of male development in a TSD system.

Summary: Pgam5 interacts with Dishevelled2 and is essential for head formation, and for establishing and maintaining the Wnt/β-Catenin signaling gradient that patterns the anterior-posterior body axis in Xenopus laevis.

Summary: Svb and SoxN activate overlapping sets of structural genes that orchestrate denticle formation and control the precise shaping of epidermal cell structures in the Drosophila embryo.

Summary: ZERZAUST acts in a non-cell-autonomous manner and is required for cell wall organization during tissue morphogenesis, while zerzaust mutants show defects in cell wall composition.

Summary: A combination of biochemical and functional experiments demonstrate that p38 function is not required for dorsal-ventral axis formation and skeletogenesis, as was previously believed.

Summary: RET-mediated GDNF signaling in the urogenital sinus increases proliferation of urethral mesenchyme cells and suppresses androgen-induced proliferation and differentiation of prostate epithelial cells.

Summary: Deletion of Sox9 in the salivary gland epithelium results in loss of the distal epithelial progenitors, a reduction in proliferation and a subsequent failure in branching in mice.