Issues

Summary: Identifying technical challenges of studying human development, and potential solutions to those obstacles, provides a framework for the research community to help advance knowledge and application of human developmental biology.

Summary: A Spotlight on the challenges of maturing cells that are differentiated from human pluripotent stem cells in vitro, discussing methods to drive cardiomyocyte maturation, as an example.

Summary: A review of The Company of Biologists workshop ‘Fostering quantitative modelling and experimentation in Developmental Biology’, held in July 2022.

Summary: A self-renewing organoid system reveals that the shape and junctional structure of human lung epithelial progenitor cells during branching are controlled by MAPK/ERK and PI3K/AKT signalling.

Highlighted Article: Light-controlled exposure of the Notch ΦWΦP motif leads to CSL sequestration in Drosophila, suggesting that this interaction could occur prior to nuclear entry during normal signalling.

Highlighted Article: Polyploidy is widespread in murine placental cell types. The transcription factor MYC supports polyploidy and prevents premature senescence in trophoblast giant cells.

Highlighted Article: The characterization of vacuoles in chick and quail hemogenic endothelial cells, and the analysis of aquaporin localization suggest that endothelial cell rounding by water permeation is regulated by aquaporin.

Summary: Abrogation of BMP signaling in early murine embryonic limb muscle precursors impaired their migration and proliferation, accelerated myogenic lineage progression and caused an aberrant proximodistal muscle pattern.

Summary: Notch signaling promotes the neurogenesis of late-born cortical fates in mouse brain by upregulating the microRNAs let-7, miR-99a/100 and miR-125b.

Highlighted Article: Bridging the mathematical theory of dynamical systems and high-dimensional transcriptomic data of differentiating cells by studying statistical signatures of linear instability, encoded in a time-varying covariance matrix.

Summary: Studying the role of the epigenetic regulator Stuxnet in Drosophila developmental signaling reveals that it promotes Notch receptor mRNA expression by counteracting the activity of Polycomb repressive complex 1.

Summary: Groucho switches between active and inactive states during the cell cycle, and restricts gene expression in a phase-specific manner; relief of its repression is required for progression through G2 phase.

Summary: The CIARA algorithm robustly identifies rare cell types and their markers across multiple modalities of single-cell sequencing data.