Nature Physics - Zebrafish can regenerate amputated fins back to their original size. It is now shown that gradients in extracellular signal-regulated kinase activity act as rulers during fin bone...

Using quantitative live imaging, Brantley et al. reveal that cells decode dynamic BMP signaling during dorsal patterning of the Drosophila embryo by integrating activity over time. These results advan...

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System identification approaches are commonly used in engineering to infer simple yet predictive models of complex systems from their responses to ...

Ben-Zion Shilo, a distinguished Israeli geneticist (Figure 1), passed away this April at the age of 73 at his home in Rehovot. Benny, as he was known to his friends and colleagues around the world, ma...

How do vascular tissues grow with the rest of the developing organism postnatally? In this issue of Cell Systems, Pi et al. combine modeling with molecular biology to uncover how cell behaviors scale ...

Cells take on specific fates during development based on cues, which can be genetic or mechanical. Now it is shown that the decision of cell nuclei to either migrate to the outer cortex or remain inte...

Spatiotemporal control of subcellular events is crucial for embryogenesis. A new study in fruit flies reports that the speed of chromosome segregation upon nuclear division robustly scales with spindl...

Regeneration of an amputated salamander limb or fish fin restores pre-injury size and structure, illustrating the phenomenon of positional memory. Although appreciated for centuries, the identity of p...

Despite tubulin’s evolutionary conservation, microtubule dynamics are highly temperature sensitive. Troman et al. use natural tubulin variants from closely related Xenopus species to show that a decrease in tubulin’s apparent activation energy and weakening of lateral lattice contacts stabilize microtubules in cold-adapted frogs.

Xu et al. investigate how the speed of chromosome separation is regulated during the cleavage divisions of the Drosophila blastoderm. They find that spindle length and the cell cycle oscillator jointly control the velocity of chromosome movement in anaphase.