Global morphogenetic flow is accurately predicted by the spatial distribution of myosin motors
- University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
- Princeton University, United States
Abstract
During embryogenesis tissue layers undergo morphogenetic flow rearranging and folding into specific shapes. While developmental biology has identified key genes and local cellular processes, global coordination of tissue remodeling at the organ scale remains unclear. Here we combine in toto light-sheet microscopy of the Drosophila embryo with quantitative analysis and physical modeling to relate cellular flow with the patterns of force generation during the gastrulation process. We find that the complex spatio-temporal flow pattern can be predicted from the measured meso-scale myosin density and anisotropy using a simple effective viscous model of the tissue, achieving close to 90% accuracy with one time dependent and two constant parameters. Our analysis uncovers the importance of a) spatial modulation of myosin distribution on the scale of the embryo and b) the non-locality of its effect due to mechanical interaction of cells, demonstrating the need for the global perspective in the study of morphogenetic flow.
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Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (PHY-1220616)
- Boris I Shraiman
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Eric F Wieschaus
National Institutes of Health (NICHD 1K99HD088708)
- Sebastian J Streichan
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF #2919)
- Boris I Shraiman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Streichan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Global morphogenetic flow is accurately predicted by the spatial distribution of myosin motors
eLife 7:e27454.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27454
