JMCB最新一期文章上线啦！

这期COLLECTION的主题为New Clues to the Understanding of Animal Development

具体内容见：  https://academic.oup.com/jmcb/issue/7/5

本期刊物导读：

 Animal development from embryogenesis to organogenesis is a highly complicated process. JMCB has published two issues on this topic (Wu, 2013, 2014). The current issue contains several works that report the latest findings related to animal development, which might provide new clues to an in-depth understanding of the complex process.

It is well-known that gene transcription regulation plays an important role in controlling embryogenesis. In the first research article of this issue, Dr Freund and collaborators indicated that the regulation of mRNA splicing is also crucial for embryonic development. The authors showed that a scaffolding protein CD2BP2 was involved in the alternative splicing of mRNA transcripts from various origins, and conditional knockout of CD2BP2 resulted in premature death of mice by affecting cellular growth and differentiation at the vascularization phase.

Organ size control is one of the fundamental aspects during animal development and involves multiple regulation mechanisms. In this issue, Dr Zhang's laboratory reported that a growth suppressor protein, lingerer (Lig), functions to restrict the organ size of Drosophila melanogaster. The authors showed that both Hippo proteins Yorkie and Mad were essential for Lig-induced bantam expression,while Lig regulated the expression of Hippo signaling pathway target genes partially via Yorkie, suggesting that Lig controls organ size of Drosophila through Hippo signaling. In addition, Drs Tiret and Pilot-Storck's laboratory reported that 3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydratase 1 (HACD1) is a key regulator of the size control during skeletal muscle growth. The authors showed that HACD1 promoted myoblast fusion during muscle development and regeneration, evidenced by myoblast fusion impairment in Hacd1-knockout mice and Hacd1-deficient myoblasts.

The multipotency of somatic stem cells or progenitors, such as neural stem cells, is required for organogenesis and tissue regeneration. Dr Shao and colleagues demonstrated that FGF8 signaling is able to maintain the progenitor status and multipotency of cranial neural crest (CNC)-derived mesenchymal cells both in vivo and in vitro. The authors also showed that exogenous overexpression of FGF8 enabled CNC-derived mesenchymal cells to participate in organogenesis such as odontogenesis. Moreover, Dr Jing's group characterized an intermediate ectodermal progenitor population derived from epiblast stem cells, and demonstrated that several extracellular signals may contribute to its generation. These findings shed light on the understanding of the formation of basic germ layers in early mouse embryonic development.

Last but not least, animal development requires diploid genomes derived from a sperm and an egg. Recent progress in generating haploid embryonic stem cells (ESCs) provides a tool to distinguish the roles of maternal and paternal genomes during the developmental process. Dr Zhou's laboratory established a new approach to fuse diploid ESCs from androgenetic and parthenogenetic haploid ESCs, and showed that full-term development of mouse embryos did not require co-participation of both paternal andmaternal genomes before the blastocyst stage.

References
Wu, J. (2013). Understanding and manipulating developmental complexity. J. Mol. Cell Biol. 5, 283.
Wu, J. (2014). Insights into complex processes of animal development. J. Mol. Cell Biol. 6, 271.