Issues

Summary: John Gurdon, who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, talks to us about his career and his thoughts on the past, present and future of reprogramming.

Summary: This Spotlight article summarizes the different approaches to performing single-cell transcriptomics on organoids, highlighting how they can generate mechanistic models of human development and disease.

Summary: This Review discusses the factors involved in hypothalamic induction, patterning and differentiation, highlighting how changes in Wnt signaling may lead to species-specific hypothalamic form and function.

Summary: During adult airway epithelial homeostasis in mice, FGFR2 signalling is required for self-renewing divisions of basal stem cells and to maintain expression of the key transcription factor SOX2.

Highlighted article: Numb establishes cell polarity in the gonadal coelomic epithelium and is required for asymmetric cell division and somatic cell fate specification during gonadogenesis.

Summary: The co-repressor TOPLESS binds via BES1 to CUC3 and BRAVO promoters and plays a crucial role in BR-mediated control of organ boundary formation in the shoot and cell division in the root.

Summary: Hox1 establishes axial identity in the Ciona endostyle, which is a structure in the pharyngeal endoderm. This regional patterning is, in turn, essential for pharyngeal muscle formation.

Highlighted article: During epicardial formation in mice, four different mechanisms of pro-epicardial cell translocation to the myocardium can be identified, with CDC42 playing a key role.

Summary: The SMC5/6 complex is essential for female fertility in mice, controlling chromosome condensation and the formation of segregation-competent bivalents during meiosis I in mouse oocytes.

Summary: BRC1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for bud growth inhibition in a variety of contexts; instead, it likely modulates bud activation potential within a wider system of bud activity control.

Summary: In C. elegans oocytes, the kinesin-13 KLP-7 prevents ectopic microtubule assembly and cytokinesis defects, highlighting a key role for kinesin-13 proteins when centrosome activity is defective or absent.

Summary: The selenoenzyme Gpx4 regulates Wnt signaling and hence zebrafish axis formation by preventing the binding of Tcf/Lefs to the promoters of Wnt target genes, independently of selenocysteine activation.

Summary: Dlx1/2 homeobox genes regulate retinal ganglion cell (RGC) differentiation by directly activating Brn3b expression; accordingly, Dlx1/Dlx2/Brn3b triple-knockout mice exhibit near complete RGC loss.

Summary: Wnt4 and Wnt11 cooperatively contribute to NMJ formation in mice through activation of both the canonical and Vangl2-dependent core planar cell polarity pathways.

Highlighted article: SEGGA is an easy to use software that allows for the quantitative analysis of changes in cell shape, movement and polarity at single-cell resolution during epithelial remodeling in various species.