Issues

Summary: This Primer outlines the important roles, different types and molecular players regulating developmental cell death, discusses recent findings, clarifies terminology and suggests links to developmental abnormalities and disease.

Summary: This Review discusses recent research into the role of physical forces, and molecular and cellular mechanisms, driving self-organisation and lineage formation in eutherian mammals.

Summary: Dissecting the mechanisms behind cell fate specification, tissue shape changes and their mutual regulation generates an integrated understanding of embryogenesis. Recent technological advances now make this possible in the human embryo.

Summary: Cell fate decisions are frequently classified as stochastic or deterministic. In this Review, we discuss the meaning and limitations of these terms and illustrate them using recent examples in the literature.

Summary: Inhibition of BMP signaling reveals its role in limb regeneration and shows that regeneration is, like development, a progressive process.

Summary: RNA-seq and ATAC-seq profiling of the dynamic transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility landscape during zebrafish fin regeneration identifies new regulatory elements that direct regeneration-responsive gene expression.

Highlighted Article: When mode and/or rate of division are changing, a branching process, rather than a thymidine analog method, provides temporal resolution, it is more robust and does not interfere with cell homeostasis.

Summary: Self-avoidance prevents dendrite crossover and is important for sensory function. This study identified a cell adhesion molecule that promotes self-avoidance by regulating cytoskeletal assembly in the dendrite.

Summary: Retinal cells use transcription factors with different expression patterns and cis-regulatory modules with different chromatin configurations to regulate the cell type- and stage-specific expression of Otx2 precisely.

Highlighted Article: Morphogenesis and growth rate of all plant organs involve the m⁶A-binding proteins ECT2, ECT3 and ECT4.

Summary: Feedback activation of the neuropeptide PTTH induces a maturation-inducing surge in steroid production that regulates the timing of the juvenile-to-adult transition in Drosophila.

Summary: Transcript levels of the C. elegans asp-1 gene are controlled by the affinity with which the intestine-specific GATA-type transcription factor ELT-2 binds to promoter XXTGATAAXX sites.

Summary: Sensory perception can increase Wnt production from neurons to reinforce developmental processes, which helps explain how animals can still develop properly when experiencing stress from environmental variations.

Summary: CRISPR/Cas9-generated erm-1 mutant alleles reveal that a PIP₂-binding site is crucial for ERM-1 function, and phosphorylation of a C-terminal regulatory threonine modulates its localization and dynamics to control actin organization and support lumen formation in development.

Summary: The time of migration and expansion of the cortical volume are factors influencing the final rostrocaudal differential arrangement of cortical interneurons in the cerebral cortex.

Highlighted Article: Investigating the auxin response at later stages of haustorium formation provides the first molecular insights into tracheary element differentiation that lead to xylem bridge formation during plant parasitism.

Summary: Mice without dynamic regulation of cell-to-extracellular matrix adhesion present belly white spotting because of delayed cell migration throughout development.

Summary: Knockdown and overexpression studies reveal that AMPK associates with dynein, phosphorylates dynein intermediate chain at Ser81, regulates cytoplasmic dynein behavior and drives nuclear migration in migratory neurons of the developing neocortex.

Summary: Defining the transcriptional programs of synovial joint cells in mouse development, including progenitors of tendon, ligament, synovium, meniscus, sheath, and permanent and transient chondrocytes, using single-cell RNA-seq.