Sungwook Choi, first author and recently graduated PhD student in Victor Ambros' lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, talks about his paper on C. elegans heterochrony, his move from South Korea to the US and his life outside the lab.

In this Primer Heather Etchevers, Elisabeth Dupin and Nicole Le Douarin review how exploratory studies of the neural crest enriched (and continue to enrich) our understanding of cancers and congenital malformations. This article is part of our ‘Advocating developmental biology’ collection – a series of review articles which make compelling arguments for the field's importance.

Current knowledge of the spatiotemporal control of brassinosteroid function in plants, focusing on primary root development and growth, stem cell self-renewal and death, and adaptation to environmental stress, is summarized in this Review from Ana Caño-Delgado and team.

Toru Miura and co-workers discover the factors important for mandible development in the termite Hodotermopsis sjostedti. Read the highlight or the full article.

Have you been to one of our Workshops?  Find out what sort of thing happens in this video. The Evo-chromo workshop was planned to foster the initiation of a new field of biology, combining expertise across many fields to comprehend the global picture of chromatin dynamics across evolution. Find out about upcoming workshops here. 

preLights – Growth and folding of epithelial sheets

Sundar Naganathan highlights two January preprints, from Yanlan Mao and Aurelien Roux and their teams, about how epithelial sheets fold into complex 3D structures. 

Catch up with other recent preLights selected for the developmental biology community.

Articles of interest in our sister journals