Issues

Summary: This Review summarizes the role of autophagy in embryonic, adult and cancer stem cells and cellular reprogramming, and highlights the consequences of autophagy dysregulation on tissue development and homeostasis.

Summary: TCF7L1 represses PS gene expression to maintain the primed, pluripotent state, with relief of this repression by BMP4 leading to upregulation of PS-promoting genes (including NODAL, WNT3 and BMP4) to drive hESC differentiation.

Highlighted Article: This study reveals a role for the transmembrane glycoprotein podoplanin in mammary stem cell function and tumorigenesis through the positive regulation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling.

Summary: RNA-dependent KDM4E chromatin localization is essential for active H3K9 demethylation during bovine embryonic genome activation, an observation that could improve outcomes in cloned cattle production.

Highlighted Article: Embryonic stem cell-derived presomitic mesoderm-like tissues exhibit synchronized Hes7 oscillations, anterior-posterior-like axis formation and segment formation, and are suitable for chemical-library screening for detailed analysis of the segmentation clock.

Highlighted Article: Investigations in gnotobiotic zebrafish reveal that resident intestinal microbes determine intestinal secretory cell fate by modulating host Notch signaling, a highly conserved pathway involved in myriad host cell fate decisions.

Summary: Connexin 30 sets the orientation of astroglial motile protrusions during polarized migration in vitro and contributes in vivo to the establishment of hippocampal astrocyte polarity during postnatal maturation.

Summary: A forced lipophagy system, established by expressing an autophagy adaptor on the surface of lipid droplets, demonstrates that depletion of lipid droplets in fertilized mouse embryos causes developmental retardation.

Summary: In chick inner ear development, cMyb is identified as a novel Lsd1-interacting partner that recruits Lsd1 to promoter regions of actively transcribed genes to control H3K9 demethylation.

Summary: Using mouse models to investigate serial tooth formation reveals that contrasting changes in tooth number associated with human mutations in AXIN2 and RUNX2 result from modulation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling in dental mesenchyme.

Summary: The first demonstration that β-catenin signaling contributes to vocal fold morphogenesis by regulating proliferation and epithelial progenitor establishment, shedding light on the etiology of poorly understood congenital laryngeal malformations.

Summary: Rac and Rho activities during dorsal closure are coordinated by the atypical Rac GEF, the ELMO-MBC complex and the Rho GAP RhoGAP19D during in vivo Drosophila mesenchymal-to-epithelial-like transitions.

Summary: The use of an optimised toolkit for efficient genome and epigenome engineering using CRISPR in chicken embryos is demonstrated, focussing on probing gene regulatory interactions during neural crest development.

Summary: Analysis of double-mutant clones of sd and putative Yki regulators provides a simple and efficient strategy to validate upstream regulators of Yki activity in Hippo signaling.

Summary: DsRed FT forms the basis of a simple and robust method for direct visualization of oxygenation exposure that is applicable to whole animals with single-cell precision.