Issues

Summary: What sets the tempo and manages the order of developmental events? New reagents and techniques in imaging, genomic engineering and in vitro culture are beginning to offer insight into the mechanisms of developmental time.

Summary: This Primer discusses how instrumental developmental biology has been in unravelling specific aspects of Wnt signalling, and its impact on current clinical research and the development of novel treatments for cancer.

Highlighted Article: Ectopic expression of Nanog, expansion of the presumptive endodermal domain and trapping of cells in the primitive streak ultimately result in consistent disrupted phenotype with loss of embryonic structures.

Summary: nppa/nppb double mutant zebrafish embryos have increased cardiac jelly, which can be abrogated by bmp4 knockdown and places Nppa and Nppb in a regulatory loop with Tbx2, upstream of Bmp.

Highlighted Article: Combinatorial mutagenesis studies reveal that a large family of Forkhead transcription factors integrate diverse signaling outputs to specify distinct cartilages and teeth in the developing zebrafish face.

Summary: Planar cell polarity proteins function in cochlear supporting cells to guide peripheral axon guidance and the innervation of outer hair cells by the spiral ganglion.

Summary: A model for developmentally scheduled regression of vascular endothelial cells reveals a link between the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and the cell-cycle regulators MYC and CDKN1A.

Summary: Two novel Drosophila proteins, Yif1 and Yip1, associate with each other and regulate Golgi integrity to act as novel players of dendrite pruning in sensory neurons during early metamorphosis.

Summary: A mathematical model to simulate melanoblast distribution in the embryonic mouse epidermis, based on keratinocyte attraction, melanoblast repulsion and melanoblast memory of their previous path.

Summary: Here, using chick embryos, we showed that post-transcriptional silencing of the Gli3 repressor by miR-133 is required to stably establish the myogenic programme in early somites.

Summary: The direct RA target genes Hnf1b and Fzd4 act as mediators of RA function in the pre-patterning of the dorsal endoderm during Xenopus gastrulation, resulting in pancreas specification in this context.

Highlighted Article: In situ hybridization chain reaction (HCR) v3.0 exploits automatic background suppression to enable multiplexed quantitative mRNA imaging and flow cytometry with dramatically enhanced performance and ease of use.

Summary: A new array tomography workflow for model organisms optimizing EM preparation and fluorescence signal preservation, facilitating 3D data acquisition and the correlation of fluorescence and EM data.