the community site for and by developmental biologists
Posted by Erin M Campbell on July 12th, 2013
I appreciate my health and body, but I admit that there are times when I take all of the amazing biology inside my body for granted. My bones and muscles help me easily type this sentence, but the coordination that takes place to form the musculoskeletal system is far from simple. Today’s image is from[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on June 14th, 2013
Regeneration is a superpower not just reserved for superheroes—salamanders and newts are able to regenerate lost limbs and tails, and fish can regenerate new retinal neurons after injury to the eye. Mammals have limited ability to regenerate retinal neurons, but a recent paper in Development finds that a single transcription factor may be able to[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on May 16th, 2013
For most of us, we don’t all end up settled as adults in the same town where we were born. The same is true for many cells, including some stem cells in the fruit fly intestine. A recent paper describes the migration of progenitor cells, some of which will later become stem cells, in the[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on April 11th, 2013
Monday is tax day for most of us on the American side of the pond. That ought to cause massive hair loss for many folks, but we have amazing hair follicles that constantly regenerate hair throughout our adult lives (well, at least for those of us without male pattern baldness). A recent paper in Development[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on March 7th, 2013
You didn’t stop developing once you were born (or hatched). Our infant selves barely resemble ourselves as adults, thankfully, and stem cells play an important role in this continued development. A recent paper describes the identification of a stem cell niche that generates the melanophores that are responsible for the color patterning in adult zebrafish.[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on February 15th, 2013
A lot of things cycle in life, even down to the cellular level. In the developing central nervous system, regulators of the cell cycle play important roles in maintaining the balance between stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. A recent paper in the journal Development describes a cell cycle regulator in stem and progenitor cells in[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on January 14th, 2013
Every time a biologist drives pluripotent cells to differentiate into a specialized cell type, patients of all sorts of diseases, disorders, and injuries allow their hope to grow. A research group recently reported how to drive differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into medium-sized spiny neurons, the neurons that are some of the first to[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on December 12th, 2012
There are a lot of situations in life where the “middleman” is unnecessary and costly. In cells, that middleman is necessary and fascinating at the same time. The sequence of DNA to middleman mRNA to protein provides our cells with countless ways to regulate complex events, including those surrounding stem cell divisions. When stem cells[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on November 13th, 2012
Most folks think that our brains don’t produce any more neurons after we’re born, but thankfully they do! A small subset of stem cells within the hippocampus gives rise to neurons in a region of the brain believed to be associated with learning and memory, and a recent paper describes the self-renewal properties and potential[…]
Posted by Erin M Campbell on October 10th, 2012
To me, the stem cells within a germline are a perfect storm of fascination. Stem cells are, of course, intriguing in their ability to self-renew and differentiate, and a germline is intriguing in its ability to generate gametes. Add stem cells and germlines together, and you have amazing biology in front of you…and more biology[…]
