Issues

Summary: Richard Gardner, winner of the BSDB's Waddington Medal, discusses his life in research, his decades as a policy advisor and his thoughts on mentorship.

Summary: This Primer gives an overview of the role of TOR signaling networks in plant growth and development, highlighting similarities and differences between the function of TOR complexes in plants and animals.

Summary: This Review discusses the molecular pathways that determine how a leaf grows and acquires its shape, and the effect of environmental and evolutionary factors on leaf shape diversity.

Summary: The first demonstration that gibberellins are involved in the determination of ovule number in plants, via the activity of DELLA proteins – negative regulators of gibberellin signaling.

Summary: Conditional deletion of genes that regulate intracellular cholesterol biosynthesis in mesenchymal cells or chondrocytes shows that precise regulation of biosynthesis is required for chondrocyte homeostasis and long bone growth.

Summary: Expression of a dominant-negative form of retinoic acid receptor α in Leydig cells reveals a role for this receptor in male infertility.

Summary: The highly conserved homeodomain transcription factor Bsx controls zebrafish pineal gland development, laterality of the epithalamus and melatonin production.

Summary: The Drosophila Hox gene Ultrabithorax, which distinguishes halteres from wings, downregulates Matrix metalloproteinase 1 expression to maintain ECM protein levels and so form the haltere globular shape instead of the flat wing.

Summary: wit is regulated by alleviation of Brinker repression in two evolutionarily divergent Drosophila species, in which evolutionary changes in wit expression patterns have occurred in cis.

Summary: Development of the embryonic kidney involves interactions between hedgehog, smoothened and GLI3 in cortical stromal cells that control nephron formation via TGFβ signaling.

Summary: miR-8 controls growth and tumorigenesis in the Drosophila wing epithelium.

Highlighted Article: Contact inhibition of lamellipodia formation is promoted by a fibronectin-integrin-syndecan-based control module and ephrin B1 in the Xenopus gastrula mesendoderm, and differentially suppressed by PDGF-A to allow for oriented collective migration.

Summary: Analysis of Sox30 mutants using ChIP-seq, meiotic analysis and RNA-seq identifies the direct targets of Sox30 and reveals that Sox30 is a transcription factor of postmeiotic genes in mouse testes.

Summary: Defective Hoxb8 microglia, a proposed cause of trichotillomania-like behavior in mice, have a distinct ontogeny relative to canonical microglia, providing the brain with greater microglial functional diversity.

Highlighted Article: Vascular malformations can arise as a consequence of defective cell migration in areas in which proliferation is naturally high, as endothelial cells are unable to re-distribute within the vascular network.

Summary: Mouth-form dimorphism in the nematode Pristionchus pacificus is an established model for understanding molecular mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity. Here, we discover that plasticity is regulated by two independent sulfation events.

Summary: Stratum, the putative guanine nucleotide exchange factor for Rab GTPases, is involved in restricting the apical delivery of Sanpodo to control spatiotemporal Notch activation following asymmetric cell division in Drosophila sensory organs.

Summary: Myocardial Bmp2 and endocardial Notch signaling cooperate to pattern the embryonic valve region: Bmp2-pSmad1/5 induces Jag1 ligand expression and interacts with N1ICD to drive target gene expression.

Summary: Clonal analysis shows that four distinct progenitor groups expand the normal amniotic ectoderm differently. In SMAD5-deficient mice, an undersized and abnormally nonsquamous amnion involves at least two impaired progenitor groups.

Summary: Recruitment of the transcriptional repressor Yan and the co-repressor Groucho by the transcriptional activator Pointed confers precision and robustness to the gene expression dynamics that drive developmental cell fate transitions.

Highlighted Article: A novel in vivo metabolic RNA sequencing method, SLAM-ITseq, enables cell type-specific transcriptome analysis without time-intensive cell or RNA sorting steps, making it accessible to a broader research area.