Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Cardiac neural crest (CNC) cells are pluripotent cells derived from the dorsal neural tube that migrate and contribute to the remodeling of pharyngeal arch arteries and septation of the cardiac outflow tract (OFT). Numerous molecular cascades regulate the induction, specification, delamination, and migration of the CNC. Extensive analyses of the CN...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
With ever-improving methods of cell characterization, the field of immunology has enjoyed unprecedented opportunities to resolve distinctions between lymphocyte populations. However, this has led to a proliferation of "subset" designations that threatens to complicate and confuse clear identification of populations that share critical functional tr...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Treatment of type 1 diabetes with insulin injection is expensive, complicated, and insufficient. While cadaveric islet transplantations coupled with immunosuppressants can cure diabetes, the scarcity of acceptable islets is problematic. Developmental research on pancreas formation has informed in vitro differentiation of human pluripotent stem cell...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
The cardiac conduction system initiates and propagates each heartbeat. Specialized conducting cells are a well-conserved phenomenon across vertebrate evolution, although mammalian and avian species harbor specific components unique to organisms with four-chamber hearts. Early histological studies in mammals provided evidence for a dominant pacemake...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Mouse spermatogenesis is supported by spermatogenic stem cells (SSCs). SSCs maintain their pool while migrating over an open (or facultative) niche microenvironment of testicular seminiferous tubules, where ligands that support self-renewal are likely distributed widely. This contrasts with the classic picture of closed (or definitive) niches in wh...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
The distal lung is a honeycomb-like collection of delicate gas exchange sacs called alveoli lined by two interspersed epithelial cell types: the cuboidal, surfactant-producing alveolar type II (AT2) and the flat, gas-exchanging alveolar type I (AT1) cell. During aging, a subset of AT2 cells expressing the canonical Wnt target gene, Axin2, function ...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Immunological memory, defined as the ability to respond in an enhanced manner upon secondary encounter with the same pathogen, can provide substantial protection against infectious disease. The improved protection is mediated in part by different populations of memory CD8 T cells that are retained after primary infection. Memory cells persist in th...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Understanding how the four-chambered mammalian heart is formed from a simple, looped tube remains challenging, notwithstanding the descriptive accounts left by generations of cardiac anatomists. Much of the difficulty lies in attempting to visualize an intricate series of morphological transformations through the restrictive lens of two-dimensional...
Published in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology
Advances in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and computational analysis have enabled the systematic interrogation of the cellular composition of tissues. Combined with tools from developmental biology, cell biology, and genetics, these approaches are revealing fundamental aspects of tissue geometry and physiology, including the distribution, origins...
