Issues

Summary: This Spotlight gives an overview of the discovery and current understanding of transcriptional adaptation, and discusses how its main features appear to be conserved across species.

Summary: This Primer describes how fluid flow, a powerful morphogenic force, is created in different systems and highlights the important mechanosensitive signalling pathways involved for sensing and transducing flow during embryogenesis.

Summary: This Review integrates recent advances in vascular single cell biology to develop the concepts of structural and functional angiodiversity.

Summary: In this Review, we discuss recent insight into the molecular identity of the intestinal stem cells, including their signalling crosstalk, proliferation and epigenetic and metabolic states, and their role during development and regeneration.

Summary: This study describes a method for reducing remodeling/reprogramming factors in oocytes, allowing examination of the relationship between the amount of these factors and somatic cell reprogramming.

Highlighted Article: FRAP and optogenetic experiments reveal that Lgl dynamics in the lateral cortex of epithelial cells do not require binding to Scrib-Dlg, but depend on their ability to limit aPKC activity.

Summary: CD9 participates in surface compartmentalization that enables an exofacial exclusion of GPI-APs from the cortical actin cap region of the oocyte, thus confining GPI-APs to the appropriate fusion site.

Summary: CHD7 is an evolutionarily conserved let-7 miRNA target and its deficiency is linked to the repressive function of let-7 in auditory-sensory progenitor self-renewal and hair cell differentiation in birds and mice.

Highlighted Article: This study identifies a signalling relay regulating cell shape changes during ascidian endoderm invagination, and shows that fate specification is in part uncoupled from the control of morphogenesis in early ascidian embryos.

Summary: In the polarized wing disc epithelium of Drosophila, Kinesin-like protein 98A mediates transcytosis of multivesicular endosomes.

Summary: SNARE-dependent secondary secretion via Rab4 recycling endosomes plays an important role in coordinating long-range extracellular levels of the hydrophobic morphogen Wnt/Wingless.

Summary: Analysis of mutants lacking many known H3K4 regulators reveals the role of H3K4 methylation in C. elegans neuronal functions and suggests that aberrant axon guidance is a shared trait in neurodevelopmental diseases.

Summary: RDH10 is a key enzyme that produces the retinoic acid (RA) required for inner ear development. Regional patterning of vestibular organs requires RA, which autoregulates by maintaining levels of its degradation enzyme CYP26b1.

Summary: In the invertebrate chordate Botryllus schlosseri, germ cell chemotaxis towards the primary chemoattractant Sphingosine- 1-Phosphate is enhanced by ABC transporter-mediated export of a secondary chemoattractant: an eicosanoid signaling molecule.

Highlighted Article: The developing renal interstitium consists of multiple molecularly unique zones of cells that occupy distinct anatomical niches that non-autonomously affect development of the renal epithelia.

Summary: EGFR-sfGFP, a new tool for quantitative analyses of EGFR in fly tissues, is used to determine the levels and compartment localization of EGF receptors in Drosophila follicle cells.