Several signalling pathways have been implicated in early liver development and mosaic analysis has revealed an essential involvement of the lateral plate mesoderm (LPM) in this process. Consistently, a zebrafish gene, prometheus/wnt2bb, bilaterally expressed in the LPM adjacent to the forming liver, is required for liver specification. Although liver specification initially fails to occur in p...

Microdeletion and microduplication copy number variations are found in patients with autism spectrum disorder and in a number of cases they include genes that are involved in the canonical Wnt signaling pathway (for example, FZD9, BCL9 or CDH8). Association studies investigating WNT2, DISC1, MET, DOCK4 or AHI1 also provide evidence that the canonical Wnt pathway might be affected in autism. Pre...

Loss of Tbx4 results in absence of chorio-allantoic fusion and failure of formation of the primary vascular plexus of the allantois leading to embryonic death at E10.5. We reviewed the literature for genes implicated in chorio-allantoic fusion, cavitation and vascular plexus formation, processes affected in Tbx4 mutant allantoises. Using this candidate gene approach, we identified a number of g...

The development of a complex organ, such as the lung, relies upon precisely controlled temporal and spatial expression patterns of signaling pathways for proper specification and differentiation of the cell types required to build a lung. While progress has been made in dissecting the network of signaling pathways and the integration of their positive and negative feedback mechanisms, there is ...