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Differentiation of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) has successfully been used to study tissue and organ development in vitro. Eleonora Conti and Oliver Harschnitz review the pros and cons of using human PSCs to investigate the development of placodes – embryonic structures giving rise to diverse organs – during the early steps of human embryonic development […]

Researchers at the Human Technopole and Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics show how molecular cargo trains change direction in cellular micro-antennas. Cilia are antenna-like structures that protrude outwards from the surface of eukaryotic cells. Misassembled cilia in humans can cause numerous diseases from infertility to lung malfunction. The assembly and maintenance […]

Cilia are hair-like organelles that extend from most eukaryotic cells and perform many functions, including motility and signaling. Together with collaborators at the University of Geneva (Hamel-Guichard lab) and Biozentrum, University of Basel (Engel Lab), Dr. Gaia Pigino’s Group at the Human Technopole in Milan has now revealed that cilia have a specialised transport hub […]

Supervised classification methods can be used for the analysis of genetic screens obtained through the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology. Nevertheless, these methods require large sets of reference genes to be included among those targeted with CRISPR. Alessandro Vinceti, of the Iorio Group, presents a novel computational method to identify reference gene sets of minimal size […]

Recombination of retrotransposons is known to affect genome stability and evolution, yet the significance of this process and its impact on the genome of human somatic cells are poorly understood. Giovanni Pascarella and Piero Carninci set up a new framework enabling comprehensive studies of retrotransposon recombination-driven genomic diversity in healthy and diseased tissues. The DNA […]