Issues

Summary: Great advancements have been made in recent years to bring pluripotent stem cell-based therapies to the clinic. This Spotlight highlights promising clinical results and discusses challenges associated with clinical translation.

Summary: This Review covers the mechanisms of primordial germ cell migration in model organisms and systems, emphasizing the guidance factors and signaling pathways necessary for colonization of the gonad.

Summary: Actin filaments in a specific conformational state are formed during oocyte fate establishment in Drosophila, and they are recognised only by a subset of actin-binding proteins.

Summary: Genetic ablation of cadherin-based adhesion in skeletal muscle stem cells triggers activation, niche exit, precocious differentiation and subsequent depletion of the stem cell pool.

Summary: Fibronectin matrix substrate couples apical growth of frontal bone and coronal suture patency in early embryonic development, leading to calvarial pathologies when disrupted.

Summary: Analysis of genetic variants of bovine CFAP58 and loss of Cfap58 in mice reveals that CFAP58 is required for correct development of manchette structure during spermatogenesis, thereby affecting male fertility.

Highlighted Article: The cell cycle kinase Aurora A has two distinct roles in regulating the timing of cell polarization: a late role required for symmetry breaking, and an earlier function that ensures a unique polarity axis.

Highlighted Article: Mouse embryonic diapause is induced by either decreased concentration of several nutrients in the uterine fluid of mice suffering from pre-implantation maternal starvation in vivo or nutrient deprivation in vitro.

Summary: Analysis of zebrafish mutants and lineage tracing of ptf1a-expressing progenitors reveal that Foxp and Skor family transcriptional regulators control the differentiation of Purkinje cells from neural progenitors expressing the proneural genes ptf1a and neurog1.

Highlighted Article: Macrophages adopt a unique metabolic profile to convert engulfed cell mass into lipoproteins and storage peptides that metabolically supplement other tissues during post-metamorphic maturation in Drosophila.

Summary: Identification of a previously undescribed neuro-mesenchymal cell population in the embryonic hematopoietic stem cell niche through multi-layered transcriptomics and computational analyses.