An open mind and collaborative spirit have taken Hans Clevers on a journey from medicine to developmental biology, gastroenterology, cancer, and stem cells.
Hydra vulgaris constantly replenish the cells in their heads and grow new ones to reproduce asexually. But gene expression analyses reveal that regenerating a head after an injury is a very different process.
A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details.
Distantly related, lookalike Heliconius species arrive at the same appearance using the same few genes, but regulated differently, according to recent studies.
Image: Courtesy of Elliott Marguiles PIPS ON PARADE: Researchers used a MultiPipMaker to show the alignments, expressed as percent identity plots, between a human reference sequence and several other species. This is a 20 kb region surrounding exon 2 of the MET gene. Gap-free alignable segments are represented as horizontal lines along the human reference sequence; the line's height represents the identity of that alignment. Aristotle envisioned humanity as the pinnacle of a "Great Chai
Studying how neural crest cells journey through the embryo, this Caltech developmental biologist has revealed how they form major cell types, including peripheral neurons, bone, and smooth muscle.
The finding confirms that a cluster of cells that directs the fate of other cells in the developing embryo is evolutionarily conserved across the animal kingdom.