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Thiery, Viasnoff and colleagues study the roles of myosin contractility and actin dynamics in regulating the recruitment of E-cadherin at adherens junctions, using an assay that allows live 3D imaging of the intercellular contact of a suspended cell doublet.
Wittmann and colleagues demonstrate that the turnover of mature focal adhesions is regulated by CLASP proteins. They show that CLASP recruitment to focal adhesions is involved in localized exocytosis and extracellular matrix degradation, suggesting that local matrix metalloprotease secretion might promote focal adhesion disassembly.
Hodgson and colleagues use a Rac1 biosensor to delineate a signalling pathway that promotes invadopodia dissolution through the activities of the Rac1 GEF Trio, Rac1 and the Pak1 kinase.
Many cell surface receptors are internalized by clathrin-independent endocytosis, but how clathrin-independent carriers (CLICs) are generated at the plasma membrane remained unclear. Johannes and colleagues now report that galectin-3 (Gal3) binds to glycosylated cargo proteins and glycosphingolipids. These interactions induce membrane deformation, revealing a mechanism for CLIC biogenesis.
In the presence of incorrectly segregated chromosomes, the Aurora-B-dependent abscission checkpoint prevents the final stage of cytokinesis. Stenmark and colleagues identify a role for the previously uncharacterized protein ANCHR at the checkpoint, where it acts in an Aurora-B-dependent manner to retain the ATPase VPS4 at the midbody.
Jones and colleagues combine lineage tracing experiments, chemical carcinogenesis assays and mathematical modelling to study field change development in a preneoplastic epithelium. They demonstrate that Notch pathway inhibition in oesophageal epithelial progenitor cells results in imbalanced differentiation, and mutant clone expansion and dominance in the epithelium, increasing the likelihood of transformation.
Using in vitro reconstitution systems, three studies shed light on the interactions of Atg8 family proteins with cargo receptors and components of the basal autophagy machinery. The results have important mechanistic implications for selective macroautophagy, scaffold formation and spatio-temporal organization of the lipidation process during autophagosome formation.
Heterogeneity in tumour cell properties underlies many treatment failures. Understanding the sources of such heterogeneity has proved to be challenging, but remains critical to improving patient outcomes. Integrin αvβ3 expression in multiple types of solid tumour stem cells is now shown to control a pro-survival pathway that contributes to therapy resistance.
Multipolar spindles are a feature of cancer cells often associated with chromosomal aberrations. In the final Review in our Series on Genomic Instability, Logarinho and Maiato discuss how multipolar spindles form, with an emphasis on the role of the loss of spindle pole integrity in this process.
We discuss editorial policies that aim to facilitate transparency and reproducibility, and their impact on the research content published in Nature Cell Biology.
The zebrafish trunk has a repetitive pattern of dark stripes and light interstripes, arising from the distribution of distinct pigment cells. Nusslein-Volhard and colleagues have traced clones of pigment cells to show that iridophores forming the interstripes emerge from the dorsal root ganglia into the myoseptum, from where they proliferate and spread. The melanophores themselves appear in situ in between these regions to form the stripes.
Nam and van Deursen find that overexpression of either cyclin B1 or cyclin B2 in mice causes tumorigenesis and aneuploidy. They show that increased levels of these proteins lead to distinct chromosome segregation defects, and they identify a role for cyclin B2 in centrosome separation.
Cheresh and colleagues delineate a pathway that regulates tumour cell stemness and resistance to therapy. They find that the unliganded integrin αvβ3 is able to promote cancer cell self-renewal, tumour initiation and resistance to EGFR inhibitors by binding KRAS and RalB to activate the NF-κB pathway.
The E2-like enzyme Atg3 conjugates phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) to Atg8 to facilitate its membrane association and promote autophagosome maturation. Melia and colleagues report that Atg3 preferentially associates in vitro with highly curved, PE-enriched membranes, such as the isolation membrane of a nascent autophagosome, thus ensuring access to a local supply of PE.
Fox and colleagues report that phosphorylation of profilin-1 in endothelial cells induces HIF-1α activation, leading to tumour angiogenesis in glioblastoma.
Beachy and colleagues use a chemical carcinogenesis mouse model of bladder cancer to demonstrate that an Shh-expressing basal urothelial stem cell is the cell of origin of invasive bladder carcinoma, and to analyse the progression of these lesions.