Issues

Summary: Peter Lawrence reflects on the life and work of Sydney Brenner – ‘the Oscar Wilde of science’.

Summary: Research reported at the seventh EMBO meeting on the Molecular and Cellular Basis of Regeneration and Tissue Repair included important discoveries on regeneration and provided perspectives for regenerative medicine.

Summary: During development, specialized cells produce signals that are distributed among receiving cells to induce a variety of cellular behaviors and organize tissues. This Primer discusses how the dynamic regulation of cytonemes facilitates such signal transfer.

Summary: This Review discusses current knowledge of the developmental origins of various macrophage populations and the non-canonical functions of macrophages in development, regeneration and tissue repair.

Summary: Zebrafish microglia help to prevent the spread of tissue damage in the aftermath of a brain injury by migrating to the lesion site and clearing it of dead cells.

Summary: The ciliary GTPase Arl3 is required to maintain mitotic spindle orientation and planar cell polarity signaling during skin development, processes that are crucial to the maintenance of epithelial architecture.

Summary: The Sonic hedgehog receptor Boc is implicated in oligodendrogenesis and axon calibre regulation during development, and participates in microglia and/or macrophage transition from highly to faintly ramified morphology during myelin repair.

Highlighted Article: CRISPR/Cas9 reveals that Lsdia1 is the gene that determines the body handedness of Lymnaea stagnalis from the undifferentiated one-cell stage, through the decisive 3rd cleavage and via the nodal and Pitx pathways.

Summary: FGF signaling induces and patterns the frog left-right organizer in the early gastrula and regulates the morphogenesis of the flow sensor following specification of the precursor tissue.

Highlighted Article: CRISPR-generated mutants and theoretical modeling show that Dll is a crucial activator of butterfly wing eyespot center differentiation.

Summary: In the Malpighian tubules, GATAe is necessary not only for the morphology and function of the tubule but for the integrative physiology of the animal as a whole.

Highlighted Article: Interaction between endocardial cells and cardiomyocytes during the initial stages of in vitro cardiac differentiation promotes myocardial differentiation and maturation through the BMP signaling pathway.

Highlighted Article: Investigation of the Crumbs polarity protein Crb2a in zebrafish reveals a novel role in cardiac development via regulation of cell-cell adhesion and apicobasal polarity.

Highlighted Article: Hippo-Yap has several roles during lung development. We define these roles and show how they change with developmental age and the location of a cell along the proximal-distal axis of the lung.

Summary: Cut regulates the programmed death of neural stem cells by altering cohesin levels and promoting a more open chromatin conformation to allow cell death gene expression.

Summary: During mammary gland morphogenesis, paxillin regulates HDAC6 activity and microtubule acetylation to control cell polarization, cell shape and ductal branching.