Jindal and Farley present a review about enhancer grammar, introducing dependency grammar, a model where enhancers encode information based on dependencies between enhancer features shaped by...

Brennan and Weilert et al. combine experimental and computational genomics, deep learning models, and developmental genetics to investigate how transcription factors open chromatin during embryogen...

Noordstra et al. report that α-catenin mechanosensitivity within E-cadherin complexes mediates contact inhibition of epithelial migration. Antiparallel cortical flows found at lamellipodia of...

VanHorn and Morris review the origins of fate mapping and lineage tracing approaches, focusing on how advances in single-cell genomics have fueled strategies to map lineage relationships. They...

Biological tissues require fine-tuned cell type proportions for optimal function, but how this process is regulated remains poorly understood. Tran et al. suggest that lineage motifs reflect modular...

There has been recent renewed interest in studying human early embryonic development. The advent of improved culture conditions to maintain blastocysts in vitro for an extended period and the...

Lipid droplets form membrane contact sites with other organelles, including mitochondria, but the function of these contacts has been controversial. Miner et al. show that PLIN5 on lipid droplets...

MacColl Garfinkel et al. define an instructive role for mitochondrial metabolism in establishing the Spemann-Mangold Organizer in Xenopus. A mitochondrial inner membrane leak leads to a local...

Wilcockson et al. describe the development of an improved Erk-specific kinase translocation reporter (modErk-KTR). Live imaging of Erk dynamics in zebrafish and Drosophila embryos shows that Erk...

Morphogenesis involves the coordination of different cell movements. Boutillon et al. show that the collective migration of zebrafish polster cells relies on “guidance by followers,” where each cell...

Chioccioli et al. establish longitudinal imaging of intact mouse lung tissue ex vivo and in vivo to track the spatiotemporal coordination of alveolar type II cells following bleomycin-induced injury....

Sub-lethal apoptotic stress can cause oncogenic DNA damage. Investigating its basis, Cao, Riley, and colleagues report that mitochondrial dysfunction promotes sub-lethal apoptotic stress. Mitochond...

Xiang et al. analyze millions of different mRNA reporters to identify 3′ UTR sequence elements and their contextual features that control poly(A)-tail length and translation during early development...

Ando et al. report a screen in zebrafish to identify sequences that repress gene expression during tissue regeneration and find an element with silencing activity that physically contacts nearby...

It is unclear whether transient heritable epigenetic responses can have a long-lasting impact on evolution. Toker et al. describe a small-RNA-based heritable response to environmental stress that...

Complex dynamic processes such as development involve the deployment of gene regulatory pathways that transform the spatial arrangement of cells. Disentangling these genetic programs is at the core...

Collins et al. show that the mechanosensitive transcriptional regulators YAP and TAZ mediate the co-mobilization of osteoblast precursors with blood vessels, control growth plate remodeling through...

Omrane and Ben M’Barek et al. found that long-term starvation triggers a noncanonical autophagic process on lipid droplets (LDs). This process involves the binding of Atg3 to specific, ultra-large...

Midbodies (MBs) are released post-abscission as large extracellular vesicles called MB remnants (MBRs). Here, we demonstrate that the MB matrix is the site of ribonucleoprotein assembly and is...

de Almeida Magalhaes et al. demonstrate that lipidated WNT morphogens are secreted by handoff from the membrane protein WLS to extracellular carrier proteins. Soluble WNT carrier complexes deliver...

mTOR is a central regulator of metabolism, integrating nutritional and hormonal cues to control anabolic processes, organismal physiology, and aging. Simcox and Lamming review the current state of...

Nikalayevich et al. show that mouse oocytes lacking an F-actin nucleator complex undergo cortex remodeling, triggering cortex contractions that perturb mouse and human oocyte cytoplasmic organizati...

Rosner et al. characterize the human embryonic basement membrane (BM) and delineate its assembly and disassembly during in vitro embryogenesis. Next to the identification of contributing BM structu...

Nogueira-Rodrigues et al. report that Acomys can recover function after complete spinal cord injury (SCI), assembling a scarless tissue at the injury site, unlike other adult mammals. Transcriptomic...

Falvo et al. demonstrate that transient inflammatory injury leads to dynamic epigenetic alterations in lineage-committed cells of the pancreas, a subset of which are durable over time. This epigene...

Werner et al. model variability in human XCI ratios across tissues and individuals using the GTEx dataset, determining that XCI ratios are consistent across all tissue lineages. This suggests...

Using single-nucleus RNA sequencing, Cui et al. identified a unique immature cardiomyocyte population associated with heart regeneration in newborn mice. The NFYa and NFE2L1 factors are activated in...

Sato and Rosa et al. develop a 3D embryonic stem cell model and show that, during gastrulation, proliferation-induced crowding triggers basal cell delamination. In turn, delamination safeguards...

Chromosomal instability (CIN) is a hallmark of cancer and is frequently found to correlate with aggressive disease. However, the role of CIN in driving tumor progression is poorly understood. Here,...

The lysosome, the major degradative compartment within the cell, has emerged as a dynamic organelle capable of integrating diverse signals to control growth, metabolism, and quality control. Shin and...

Sur et al. map transcriptional populations with high temporal resolution during zebrafish development. They identify putative long-term progenitor states, reused developmental gene expression...

The cellular mechanisms underlying embryo-maternal interactions during implantation are poorly understood, as the implantation site is concealed by the uterine tissues. Here, Govindasamy et al....

Cell division has been implicated in fate decisions in many stem cells. Chaigne et al. show that mouse embryonic stem cells exit naive pluripotency after cell division. Naive sister cells remain...

Sepulveda-Rincon et al. present a detailed investigation of the potency of primordial germ cells (PGCs). Following injection into early mouse embryos, PGCs can display properties akin to naive...

The vertebrate neural tube, the precursor of the nervous system, forms through successive bendings of the neuroepithelium at the midline and at the dorsal folds. Roellig et al. show that dying cells,...

FGF/ERK signaling is crucial for the patterning and proliferation of cell lineages that comprise the mouse blastocyst. Using an ERK-kinase translocation biosensor, Simon et al. show that the trophe...

Oberkersch et al. demonstrate that endothelial cells (ECs) use glutamate and transaminase-mediated aspartate to drive angiogenesis in developmental and pathological angiogenesis. Mechanistically,...

The naive, formative, and primed pluripotent states and their interconversions recapitulate the pluripotency continuum during early development. Huang et al. investigate the transcriptional programs...

How do cells build developmentally flexible organs? Lopez-Anido et al. employed single-cell transcriptomics to uncover distinct models of cell differentiation within Arabidopsis leaf tissue. Along...

Shaw et al. defined the molecular identity of regenerative zebrafish glia and performed cross-species comparisons with mammalian glia. They found that EMT localizes to zebrafish glial progenitors and...

De Giorgi et al. show that the embryo-to-seedling developmental transition in Arabidopsis is a nonautonomous process dependent on factors released by the endosperm. The authors focus on seedling...

Digit development has been mostly studied from a molecular perspective. In this work, Parada et al. characterize the cellular dynamics and mechanical aspects of digit formation. They find that...

Hagedorn et al. use a combination of genomic techniques to elucidate an endothelial signature unique to blood stem cell niches. They define the underlying cis-regulatory landscape and a transcription...

Delás et al. provide evidence that spinal cord neural progenitors use two different chromatin regulatory strategies to control differential gene expression in response to the morphogen Shh. This...

Yu et al. address the features, heterogeneity, and functions of senescent cells that arise during axolotl limb regeneration, showing that senescent cells form a niche that sustains limb progenitor...

Lee et al. identify a signaling nexus between mitochondrial GTP metabolism and mitochondrial dynamics in regulating C. elegans reproductive aging. They further demonstrate that bacterial metabolites...

Gan et al. demonstrate the roles of an uncharacterized RNA splicing factor RBPMS in mouse heart development. RBPMS regulates the cytokinesis of embryonic cardiomyocytes, whereas the absence of Rbpms...

Ragazzini et al. identify pleiotropic multipotent stem cells (SCs) and define their cortical and medullary niches in human pediatric thymi by combining scRNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, and...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and hematopoietic progenitors are essential for blood production and reside in specialized niches in the adult mammalian bone marrow. In this review, Comazzetto et al....

Cell invasion through basement membrane is energy intensive. Garde et al. identify two glucose transporters that polarize to the invasive front of the anchor cell in Caenorhabditis elegans and import...

Hu et al. identify KLF17 as a crucial player in early embryonic development through proteomic analysis in mice, showcasing its involvement in major ZGA. They highlight the importance of KLF17 as an...

Nourbakhsh, Ferreccio, et al. reveal that the protein kinase TAOK2 is a molecular tether that couples the endoplasmic reticulum to the microtubule cytoskeleton. TAOK2-mediated tethering is autoregu...

Cell migration through 3D matrix is critical to developmental and disease processes, but the mechanisms that control rear retraction are poorly understood. Hetmanski et al. show that differential...

Guerrero and Aikin et al. use live-cell imaging to characterize cell cycle dynamics upon aberrant Ras-ERK signaling to find that sustained ERK activity leads to G2 cell cycle exit. The resulting...

How the genome encodes human nephron structure and function is incompletely understood. Using multi-omic analysis of human renal organoids and fetal kidneys, Ng-Blichfeldt et al. map transcriptional...

Moreau et al. investigate the mechanisms that control fate specification of Cajal-Retzius cells, a transient neuronal type that is essential for cerebral cortex development. They demonstrate that the...

Utilizing genomic analysis to survey neural crest development, Hovland and Bhattacharya et al. identify Yamanaka factors OCT4 and SOX2 as key regulators of multipotency. The authors show how compon...

Dramatic shape changes occur during heart morphogenesis to build a functional organ. In this issue of Developmental Cell, Vignes et al. show that formation of the cardiac valve during zebrafish heart...

During collective cell migration, directional information is transmitted from a leading edge to the follower cells as a form of ERK activation waves. Hino et al. demonstrate that a mechanochemical...

Tokamov et al. show that apical polarity and actomyosin networks control subcellular distribution of Kibra, an activator of the growth-suppressing Hippo pathway. In a tug-of-war, apical polarity...

Viegas et al. explore the role of cell-cycle-associated protein 1 (CAPRIN1) in early murine-differentiated ESCs, and they show that CAPRIN1 promotes the degradation of thousands of RNA transcripts...

How nuclear size is regulated is a fundamental cell biological question. Mukherjee, Sallé et al. demonstrate that nuclear size is determined independently of cell size during early embryo developme...