Issues

Summary: This poster article reviews our current understanding of Hedgehog signalling mechanisms in metazoan development.

Summary: This Review article presents a comprehensive view of the endocardium: how it develops and then functions as an important angiocrine signalling centre, sensor and transducer of biophysical forces.

Summary: This Review article looks at the role of cardiac fibroblasts in scarring and regeneration, as well as how these cells are specified during development and the unique characteristics that define them.

Highlighted article: A new protocol for human neural crest induction from hESCs is fast and efficient, and involves TGFβ, FGF and BMP signaling to specify the neural crest independent of neural ectoderm and mesoderm.

Summary: Transcriptome analysis of lineage-specific neural progenitors reveals molecular heterogeneity at the single-cell level and the origin for the numerous distinct neurons present in a complex brain.

Summary: Transgenic analysis identifies transcription factors necessary for boundary demarcation between the nucellus and chalaza of the Arabidopsis ovule, and for patterning of WUS expression.

Highlighted article: Intestinal villus pattern in the fetal mouse is controlled by mesenchymal BMP signaling, not mechanical forces, and behaves in accordance with a reaction-diffusion Turing mechanism.

Highlighted article: Hoxb6 can disturb somitogenesis and anterior-posterior somite patterning, suggesting the existence of functional differences in somitogenesis before and after the trunk-to-tail transition.

Highlighted article: Formin 2 regulates filopodial dynamics required for efficient translocation of neuronal growth cones, while depletion of formin 2 in vivo results in aberrant axonal tracts in the spinal cord.

Summary: Cross-subclass interaction of EphB2 with ephrin A5 functions upstream of JNK signaling to maintain an adequate pool of progenitor cells to ensure proper closure of the optic fissure.

Summary: Global gene expression analyses on semilunar valve leaflets from embryonic human hearts reveals significant differences in the expression profiles of EndMT-associated and proliferation-associated genes.

Summary: The GATA factor ELT-2 is a key regulator of C. elegans intestinal differentiation and can act alone to specify the endoderm.

Summary: The proneural factor ASCL1 recruits HDAC1 to repress VegT-induced, but not Nodal-induced, mesendoderm formation via a previously uncharacterized N-terminal domain.

Summary: Conditional ablation of Yap and Taz in the cranial neural crest reveals how these proteins regulate Fox gene expression and, in turn, cranial neural crest diversification and development.

Summary: Tal1 and Gata transcription factors select between inhibitory GABAergic and excitatory glutamatergic fates of neurons regulating the dopaminergic system.

Summary: Antagonism between Nbr and Hen1 represents a novel mechanism for the modulation of piRNA sequences, revealing new players involved in the silencing of transposable elements.

Summary: Single-molecule RNA detection combined with automated cell segmentation and transcript analysis in zebrafish embryos enables efficient subcellular transcript quantification in tissues and embryos.