In their review on spinal cord regeneration, Juan Felipe Diaz Quiroz and Karen Echeverri consider how certain vertebrate species, including fish and salamanders, display an amazing ability to faithfully regenerate various complex body structures after injury or ablation, and ask the question: will mammals ever be able to follow suit?

In this paper, Bradford Hill and colleagues present results which demonstrate a distinct form of autophagy induced by platelet-derived growth factor that is necessary for attaining the up-regulation of the synthetic phenotype markers osteopontin and vimentin and for survival under the conditions of high oxidative stress found to occur in vascular lesions.

In this paper, Francisco Real and colleagues have used yeast two-hybrid screening to identify ICAT (inhibitor of β-catenin and Tcf4) as a novel interactor with the pancreas-restricted transcription factor Ptf1a, and describe how ICAT regulates acinar differentiation via a novel Wnt pathway-independent mechanism that may contribute to pancreatic disease.

In this paper, Nir Nesher and colleagues describe the isolation and characterization of AdE-1 (ion channel modifier), a novel cardiotonic peptide from the sea anemone Aiptasia diaphana, which differs in several important aspects from other cnidarian toxins.