The tight control of cell division is fundamental to multicellular development, ensuring the formation of tissues and organs with the correct size, shape and function. This EMBO Workshop brings toget…

Common Fragile Sites are genomic regions prone to breakage. However, other fragile sites remain underexplored. Here, the authors used single-cell genomics to map replication stress-induced breaks, ide...

Isotope tracing is used to determine the fate of larval dietary amino acids in adult flies, and identifies Lsp2 as a key regulator of translation and lifespan that forms the molecular basis of the eff...

Animal cells extensively remodel their cytoskeleton during differentiation and can notably switch between two major motility modes: flagellum-based swimming and actin-based crawling. We previously sho...

Epithelial cells remodel their shape during phagocytosis while preserving tissue cohesion. Here, authors show that the E-cadherin/catenin adhesion complex is repurposed at phagocytic contacts, where i...

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...

Mechanical instabilities provide a general design principle for shaping developing organs and engineering soft materials. However, in slender structures, simple elastic buckling tends to erase rather ...

Adult intestinal size plasticity is driven not only by epithelial stem cells but also by remodeling of the surrounding visceral musculature. Sex- and reproduction-dependent muscle remodeling controls ...

Using quantitative live imaging, Green et al. show that proneural gene expression is biased by positional cues and that Notch is activated only after neuroblast selection in the Drosophila embryo. Thi...

Dr. Bruno Vellutini Federal University of Minas Gerais

Actin network organization dictates how and where membrane blebs form, revealed through reconstitution and simulations.

Actin network organization dictates how and where membrane blebs form, revealed through reconstitution and simulations.

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...

Sarkar et al. show that the CLASP protein Orbit stabilizes non-centrosomal microtubule plus ends in vivo, suppressing catastrophe and enabling persistent polymerization-based pushing forces. This stab...

Loyer et al. examine the subcellular localization of the actomyosin regulators RhoGAPs and RhoGEFs throughout the cell cycle of asymmetrically dividing Drosophila neural stem cells. They uncover a dua...

During gastrulation, embryonic epithelia undergo large-scale remodelling to internalise the mesoderm. Whether the cellular mechanisms underlying these tissue deformations are conserved across species ...

Sharan et al. investigate how planar cell polarity (PCP) directs counter-rotational cell flows during hair placode morphogenesis by coordinating cell crawling at the basal surface. 3D imaging and comp...

Rigidity transitions govern tissue organization in ways reminiscent of inert materials. Yet, living tissues are composed of active units with autonomous timing mechanisms, raising the question whether...

The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

Autorino et al. report a feedback loop between Nodal signalling and tissue phase transitions in zebrafish embryos. Nodal alters adhesion, triggering tissue rigidification and reduced porosity, which l...

Cell behaviors in multicellular organisms are coordinated via both diffusible molecules and by signals based on direct cell–cell contacts. The mode...