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FGF signaling plays numerous roles during organogenesis of the embryonic gut tube. Mouse explant studies suggest that different thresholds of FGF signaling from the cardiogenic mesoderm induce lung, liver, and...
The multicellular slug in Dictyostelium has a single tip that acts as an organising centre patterning the rest of the slug. High adenosine levels at the tip are believed to be responsible for this tip dominance a...
Secreted frizzled-related proteins (SFRPs) are a family of proteins that block the Wnt signaling pathway and loss of SFRP1 expression is found in breast cancer along with a multitude of other human cancers. Ac...
Zebrafish has emerged as a powerful model organism to study the process of regeneration. This teleost fish has the ability to regenerate various tissues and organs like the heart, spinal cord, retina and fins....
Mouse limb bud is a prime model to study the regulatory interactions that control vertebrate organogenesis. Major aspects of limb bud development are controlled by feedback loops that define a self-regulatory ...
Valvulogenesis and septation in the developing heart depend on the formation and remodeling of endocardial cushions in the atrioventricular canal (AVC) and outflow tract (OFT). These cushions are invaded by a ...
The WNT/β-CATENIN signaling cascade is crucial for the patterning of the early lung morphogenesis in mice, but its role in the developing human lung remains to be determined. In this study, expression patterns...
Calpains are calcium regulated intracellular cysteine proteases implicated in a variety of physiological functions and pathological conditions. The Drosophila melanogaster genome contains only two genes, CalpA an...
The peptidylarginine deiminases (PADIs) convert positively charged arginine residues to neutrally charged citrulline on protein substrates in a process that is known as citrullination or deimination. Previous ...
To facilitate the in vivo study of esophageal (stem) cell biology in homeostasis and cancer, novel mouse models are necessary to elicit expression of candidate genes in a tissue-specific and inducible fashion. To...
Wnts are a family of secreted signaling molecules involved in a number of developmental processes including the establishment of cell fate, polarity and proliferation. Recent studies also implicate wnts in epi...
Histone deacetylase-4 (Hdac4) is a class II histone deacetylase that inhibits the activity of transcription factors. In humans, HDAC4 deficiency is associated with non-syndromic oral clefts and brachydactyly m...
A hallmark of Drosophila segmentation is the stepwise subdivision of the body into smaller and smaller units, and finally into the segments. This is achieved by the function of the well-understood segmentation ge...
A metamorphic life-history is present in the majority of animal phyla. This developmental mode is particularly prominent among marine invertebrates with a bentho-planktonic life cycle, where a pelagic larval f...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Developmental Biology 2013 13:30
The mammary gland is key to all mammal species; in particular in multiparous species like pigs the number and the shape of functional mammary gland complexes are major determinants of fitness. Accordingly, we ...
Folic acid supplementation reduces the risk of neural tube defects and congenital heart defects. The biological mechanisms through which folate prevents birth defects are not well understood. We explore the us...
Among the four major bilaterian clades, Deuterostomia, Acoelomorpha, Ecdysozoa, and Lophotrochozoa, the latter shows an astonishing diversity of bodyplans. While the largest lophotrochozoan assemblage, the Spi...
During early stages of brain development, secreted molecules, components of intracellular signaling pathways and transcriptional regulators act in positive and negative feed-back or feed-forward loops at the m...
Mammals are not able to restore lost appendages, while many amphibians are. One important question about epimorphic regeneration is related to the origin of the new tissues and whether they come from mature ce...
The formation of a tubular organ, such as the heart, requires the communication of positional and polarity signals between migratory cells. Key to this process is the establishment of a new luminal domain on t...
Multipotent stem cells have been successfully isolated from various tissues and are currently utilized for tissue-engineering and cell-based therapies. Among the many sources, skin has recently emerged as an a...
Because of the structural and molecular similarities between the two systems, the lateral line, a fish and amphibian specific sensory organ, has been widely used in zebrafish as a model to study the developmen...
Multicellularity in cellular slime molds is achieved by aggregation of several hundreds to thousands of cells. In the model slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, adenosine is known to increase the aggregate size a...
Germline stem cells (GSCs) are present in the gonads of Drosophila females and males, and their proper maintenance, as well as their correct differentiation, is essential for fertility and fecundity. The molec...
Cell adhesion, an integral part of D. discoideum development, is important for morphogenesis and regulated gene expression in the multicellular context and is required to trigger cell-differentiation. G-protein l...
Kangaroos and wallabies have specialised limbs that allow for their hopping mode of locomotion. The hindlimbs differentiate much later in development but become much larger than the forelimbs. The hindlimb aut...
The desmosomal cadherins (DCs), desmocollin (Dsc) and desmoglein (Dsg), are the adhesion molecules of desmosomes, intercellular adhesive junctions of epithelia and cardiac muscle. Both the DCs and desmosomes h...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Developmental Biology 2014 14:13
Hemangioblasts are known as the common precursors for primitive hematopoietic and endothelial lineages. Their existence has been supported mainly by the observation that both cell types develop in close proxim...
The lung and thyroid are derived from the anterior endoderm. Retinoic acid and Fgf signalling are known to be essential for development of the lung in mouse but little is known on how the lung and thyroid are ...
The molecular mechanism that initiates the formation of the vertebrate central nervous system has long been debated. Studies in Xenopus and mouse demonstrate that inhibition of BMP signaling is sufficient to indu...
Mutations in APC, a negative regulator of the Wnt/ß-catenin pathway, can cause cancer as well as profound developmental defects. In both cases, affected cells adopt a proliferative progenitor state and fail to di...
Desert hedgehog (DHH) belongs to the hedgehog gene family that act as secreted intercellular signal transducers. DHH is an essential morphogen for normal testicular development and function in both mice and human...
Genetic alterations in human topoisomerase II alpha (TOP2A) are linked to cancer susceptibility. TOP2A decatenates chromosomes and thus is necessary for multiple aspects of cell division including DNA replication...
The molecular mechanisms governing vertebrate appendage regeneration remain poorly understood. Uncovering these mechanisms may lead to novel therapies aimed at alleviating human disfigurement and visible loss ...
The freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea exhibits two distinct reproductive modes. Individuals of the sexual strain are cross-fertilizing hermaphrodites with reproductive organs that develop post-embryonic...
Neural crest cells (NCCs) are embryonic, multipotent stem cells. Their long-range and precision-guided migration is one of their most striking characteristics. We previously reported that P0-Cre/CAG-CAT-lacZ doub...
Progesterone triggers resumption of the first meiotic division in the Rana pipiens oocyte by binding to the N-terminal external loop of the catalytic subunit of Na/K-ATPase, releasing a cascade of lipid second me...
During Drosophila development, titers of the steroid ecdysone trigger and maintain temporal and tissue specific biological transitions. Decades of evidence reveal that the ecdysone response is both unique to spec...
The T-box transcription factor TBX3 is necessary for early embryonic development and for the normal development of the mammary gland. Homozygous mutations, in mice, are embryonic lethal while heterozygous muta...
There have been increasing attentions on the role of small RNAs, especially microRNAs in post-transcriptional gene regulation during spermatogenesis. MicroRNA-184 (miR-184) has been shown to be mainly expresse...
Identifying DNA sequences (enhancers) that direct the precise spatial and temporal expression of developmental control genes remains a significant challenge in the annotation of vertebrate genomes. Locating th...
We recently identified Rbm24 as a novel gene expressed during mouse cardiac development. Due to its tightly restricted and persistent expression from formation of the cardiac crescent onwards and later in forming...
Determining the type and source of cells involved in regenerative processes has been one of the most important goals of researchers in the field of regeneration biology. We have previously used several cellula...
Valuable insights into the complex process of retinal vascular development can be gained using models with abnormal retinal vasculature. Two such models are the recently described mouse lines with mutations in La...
Sox6 is a multi-faceted transcription factor involved in the terminal differentiation of many different cell types in vertebrates. It has been suggested that in mice as well as in zebrafish Sox6 plays a role i...
TG-interacting factors (TGIFs) belong to a family of TALE-homeodomain proteins including TGIF1, TGIF2 and TGIFLX/Y in human. Both TGIF1 and TGIF2 act as transcription factors repressing TGF-β signalling. Human TG...
Epithelial neoplasias are associated with alterations in cell polarity and excessive cell proliferation, yet how these neoplastic properties are related to one another is still poorly understood. The study of Dro...
During liver development, intrahepatic bile ducts are thought to arise by a unique asymmetric mode of cholangiocyte tubulogenesis characterized by a series of remodeling stages. Moreover, in liver diseases, ce...
Rapid advances in genomics have provided nearly complete genome sequences for many different species. However, no matter how the sequencing technology has improved, natural genetic polymorphism complicates the...
Surgical removal of the lens from larval Xenopus laevis results in a rapid transdifferention of central corneal cells to form a new lens. The trigger for this process is understood to be an induction event arisin...
