Summary: The placenta is the only mammalian organ that harbors a cancer-like genome while remaining functional and healthy. This Review highlights its high mutational load, structural variants, aneupl...

Mammalian embryos see a substantial increase in available oxygen once the placenta forms. This increase in oxygen exposure serves as a trigger for initiating the development of the hindlimb, thus cont...

The 2026 call has attracted considerable interest from the research community with 21,627 applications submitted.

Nguyen Nam Nhat - A tiny roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus explore their microscopic world

How post-transcriptional mechanisms shape the mammalian body plan remains unclear. Here, the authors establish a single-cell CRISPR screening platform in gastruloids to identify Cnot8-dependent mRNA d...

Epithelial lumen formation is fundamental to organ development, yet how apical surfaces first emerge remains unclear. Ghosh, Martin, and Chen et al., show that lumen initiation is driven via bulk deli...

Proportional organ growth requires tissue-level control of cell behavior. Yet the cues that adapt growth rates, especially after organ injury, remain unclear. Here, we uncover that developing organs a...

Conway's Game of Life shows that simple rules can generate a rich diversity of emerging structures. This cellular automaton has been translated to continuous space by Rafler (2011) in a simulation cal...

Basement membranes are scaffolds of proteins, like collagen, that give organs shape. During development, basement membranes must adapt to the growing organ. We infer how fast the basement membrane ada...

Aggregative multicellularity was key to the evolution of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

Here they show that gastruloids made of embryonic cells of the sea anemone Nematostella can robustly regenerate whole organisms. They show that Notch signaling is crucial to sort out the randomly disp...

Max Planck Today the Retraction Watch list of Nobelists who have retracted papers bids Verabschiedung to Max Planck. After days of scrutiny, Springer Nature has restored two papers by Planck, who w…

European Research Council funds research project on physical foundation for sequence-guided genome organization with 2.5 million euros

The genetic program of animal development is conserved, but its rate of execution varies across species. Heterochrony, shifts in the relative timing of developmental events, generates phenotypic varia...